Chicago (IL) - IBM made two big Mac-related announcements today that may positively impact Mac's perception in enterprise. The company said its Lotus Notes 8.5 collaboration software is now available for Macs with OS X Leopard, and announced that Lotus Symphony suite (document, spreadsheet and presentation applications) will be available for Macs free of charge later this month. In addition, a new Lotus iNotes 8.5 software now allows anyone with a Notes licence to access Notes through a Safari browser on desktop and mobile Safari browser.

The company claims that an all-new Lotus Notes 8.5 business collaboration suite also incorporates social computing elements, in addition to savvy storage technology, sleek interface and speedy performance.

With over 140 million licences already in use worldwide, and twenty years in existence, Lotus Notes is a viable corporate email and communications platform that competes with Microsoft Exchange. Lotus Notes availability for the Mac makes Apple's platform more appealing in business environment, and many major organizations, like Discovery Communications, are already using Lotus Notes 8.5 for Mac.

The software, also available for Windows and Linux, integrates with Lotus Quickr to enable file sharing among teams, and Lotus Sametime to deliver unified communication solution across the web, mobile and desktop worlds.

For instance, users can easily see who is online or available to initiate VoIP or instant messaging session. More complex features include persistent chats and screen sharing to ease knowledge sharing with large groups in real time.

Lotus Notes 8.5 employs an intelligent storage handling that decrease storage expenses, especially in large business, by ensuring that only one copy of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in around 40 percent space savings.

Speedy performance of Lotus Notes 8.5 on the Mac draws from code that's optimized for the latest Leopard features and Apple hardware. Social networking features include integration with online calendars from Google, Yahoo and others which can be shown along business calendars in one view.

Anyone with a Notes user licence can also use the new Lotus iNotes 8.5 web application to access business email, calendarand contacts on a corporate Lotus servers through a Safari web browser on your Mac or the iPhone.

Lotus iNotes lets users see their Lotus inbox on the handset, read email messages and reply to them, attach and send files in a message, get access to the calendar, meetings, events, reminders, and anniversaries, access the corporate contacts database and create new contact entries. The application also supports most widgets that extend capabilities and enables users to integrate the Notes calendar with Google calendar.

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