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HONG KONG, 4 March 2008 – IBM China/Hong Kong Limited (NYSE:IBM) announced the future of Lotus Notes and Domino today to more than 400 clients and Business Partners at its Lotusphere Comes to You 2008 conference. The presentations illustrated a roadmap of innovations, products, services and Business Partner initiatives designed to make IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software, licensed to 140 million users, the desktop of the future.

“The workforce is becoming more global and dynamic,” said Tony Lee, Brand Manager, Lotus, Software Group, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “Lotus Notes and Domino bring companies and individual workers greater mobility, security, Web 2.0 capabilities and overall higher performance.”

New Features in Lotus Notes and Domino
IBM highlighted that the new Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0 features several significant updates that help users harness the power of the Web. These include a powerful Web 2.0 feature, My Widgets, that can be used to execute actions such as retrieving real time flight arrival information simply by clicking on a flight number in an email. Users can drag and drop, or import, various kinds of widgets such as Google Gadgets, feeds, and Web pages or their own custom programs onto their new widgets panel in the Lotus Notes sidebar.

Another highlight was IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, which provides automatic, real time wireless replication of email including attachments, calendar, contacts, personal journal and the “to do” list for Microsoft Windows® Mobile devices.

IBM also previewed Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 software, the next major release that includes enhancements to the Lotus Domino Web application environment. New features planned for IBM Lotus Domino Designer 8.5 will allow applications to utilize Web 2.0 techniques such as AJAX, style sheets, and RSS or ATOM feeds.

New Technologies and Services Make Web 2.0 Real for Businesses of All Sizes
Building on its leadership in the mashup space for more than two years, new IBM Lotus Mashups allows non-technical users to easily create enterprise mashups. To solve real business problems with mashups, users can create ad hoc visualisations by blending enterprise and Web-based data. In addition, IBM introduced the next release of its popular social software for business, IBM Lotus Connections. Lotus Connections 2.0 includes several new features such as a new homepage that aggregates and filters social data from Lotus Connections into a customisable view.
The community component of Lotus Connections is planned to be enhanced with discussion forums and the ability to link leading wiki services from IBM Lotus Quickr, SocialText and Atlassian.

IBM also demonstrated the new IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1, a rich collaboration environment available through the Web and desktop plug-ins, which allows teams to more effectively work together. Plans for Lotus Quickr 8.1 include content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs, wikis and other connectors that make sharing information easier, and the capacity to integrate Lotus Quickr with Enterprise Content Management Systems such as IBM FileNet P8 and IBM Content Manager.

The next version of the popular Lotus Symphony Beta 4 software (www.ibm.com/hk/lotus_symphony), a suite of no charge desktop productivity tools, was also previewed. It features an open programming model that goes beyond Microsoft Office by transforming the basic document into a portal to the Web 2.0 world. Ready for download now, Lotus Symphony Beta 4 allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to wire capabilities into the documents that access and manage business applications such as issuing a shipping order or an invoice directly from a spreadsheet. Information can flow into documents as well. Symphony has been downloaded by more than 400,000 users and is available in 24 major languages including simplified and traditional Chinese.

“Web 2.0 for business is about empowering users with the content, social connections and mashup tools to solve business problems,” said Tony Lee. “Today's announcements illustrate the ongoing commitment of IBM to deliver innovation to our clients.”

Sametime Adoption Expands IBM Unified Communications; New Products Announced
IBM also made big advances into the rapidly growing unified communications market by unveiling a range of major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) embedded software and reseller agreements expanding IBM Lotus Sametime to millions of new users.

“When users are exposed to the integration of collaboration, data and voice, people are more productive and business moves faster - that's exactly what we are seeing with Lotus Sametime,” said Tony Lee. “Today’s announcement reflects a dramatic increase in our ability to deliver unified communications to millions of users worldwide.”

IBM is enabling a new set of channel partners, leading telephony vendor such as Cisco, Nortel and Avaya, making it easier for businesses around the world to purchase and use IBM’s UC2 platform - Lotus Sametime.

At Lotusphere Come to You 2008, IBM also demonstrated the newest members of the Lotus Sametime family of products - Lotus Sametime Advanced and Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony. Lotus Sametime Advanced software features the industry's first suite of real-time community tools that will make it easier to find information and share expertise in real time with groups of people. Now, instead of spending time trying to figure out who can help solve a problem, users can reach out to a community of people instantly. It also includes sophisticated collaboration features such as persistent chat, enabling users to keep a continuous chat discussion running on a specific topic with a related community of people. The instant sharing capabilities of Lotus Sametime Advanced let users start a screen or application sharing session and allow other participants to “drive” and make changes to documents. Additionally, users will be able to save time and effort by having the location of colleagues pre-populated, highlighting where users are located and the last known location of off-line contacts.

Planned for availability later this year, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony helps users manage telephone calls from within Lotus Sametime. With Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony, users can route calls to various devices and set rules on how to handle calls based on their status. For example, a user could select to have all calls routed to a mobile device when their calendar shows they are in a meeting. In addition, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony works with a wide range of PBX systems, giving organisations the flexibility to select telephony systems based on need and not vendor lock-in.

About IBM
For more information about IBM Hong Kong, go to: www.ibm.com/hk

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