IBM's collaboration tools evolve - Lotus Notes and Domino 7 integration improvements advance productivity for admins, developers.(International Business Machines Corp.)

Introduced in 1989, IBM Lotus Notes 7 stays true to the original's ideals of efficient collaboration. In this release, Notes e-mail and calendar entries are even easier to manage, and the Domino 7 server embraces more standards, including Web services, so developers can expose Notes databases to external systems. The already outstanding platform support is broadened with desktop Linux for e-mail and calendaring -- as well as systems management.

Although many changes are within Domino 7, the improvements to Lotus Notes 7 are far from cosmetic. For example, a Mail Thread view let me look through a long message trail to see who already responded, which saved me time. Icon indicators mark the importance of messages; you can, say, set a half-solid circle (marking it as semi-critical) if there are more than three names in the To: field, as this is likely a common broadcast distribution. I also liked new right-click options for common tasks such as flagging a message for follow-up, as well as the …