Stability restored as Lotus Notes rollout starts again

The Integrated Collaboration Environment (ICE) team is pleased to announce that the Lotus Notes rollouts have recommenced following a return of extended stability to the Server environment.

Measures undertaken to provide a more stable environment included:

• Upgrades of the Server Operating System
• Upgrades to the Domino Server versions
• The implementation of new faster storage technology
• The movement of about 10 per cent of users onto a separate server.  Some staff had been migrated to the Lotus Notes Domino server, but were using an application (ie Thunderbird) other than Lotus Notes to access their email via Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)  

Whilst we are confident we have resolved all major stability issues, IBM remain engaged in the unlikely event of further occurrences.

Scheduled rollouts for 2009 so far

Monash Sport, Gippsland Campus and the Faculty of Education, are first in line for the new collaboration-enhancing software.   Michael Jones, Team Leader - Sport Programs, Monash Sport commented, "Monash Sport have embraced the new system, are really getting to know their way around Lotus Notes and are starting to make the most of the integrated functionality.  The rollout process was fairly painless and since we’ve migrated system stability has been great".

Along with VoIP phones, PC Faxing and state of the art room-based videoconferencing, Lotus Notes is one of the key components that will deliver a more collaborative environment for Monash University and now that rollouts are back on, we are well on our way to achieving critical mass.   We look forward to providing the rest of the staff population with these organisationally-supported collaboration tools over the next year or so.

One step closer to a new way of working and talking... any where, any time

Since the beginning of the project, we have been working continuously to further develop additional products.  This time round, rollouts will offer staff enhanced functionality and this will of course be retrospectively rolled out to current Lotus Notes users over the coming weeks.

New features include:

• Booking rooms and resources via your Lotus Notes calendar
• Lotus Quickr - a document sharing repository which allows you to share and edit documents with in-built version control (available October 2009)
• Instant messaging, desktop videoconferencing, online whiteboard and detecting the online availability-status of your colleagues via Sametime Chat (available October 2009)
• The ability to synch your Lotus Notes to a number of PDA devices including Blackberry, iPhones and Windows mobile devices