Next Up on IBM i: Worklight and Forms Experience Builder?

February 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

The pressure applied on IBM to get several former Lotus products running on IBM i worked, as IBM has committed to supporting Lotus Notes Traveler and IBM Connections on the platform. Now, the Power Systems Champions are shifting their focus to getting additional products supported, too.

At the recent IBM Connect (formerly Lotusphere) conference, Justin Liu, an IBM developerWorks correspondent, and a camera crew tracked down Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, the Power Systems Champion and tireless IBM i promoter, to chat about the intersection of Power Systems servers and IBM’s collaboration platform. The interview was recently posted on IBM’s YouTube channel.

Reynolds-Lair, who’s the CIO of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, commended IBM for its recent decision to add IBM i support to Traveler, the email and messaging server for mobile devices, which will be delivered as part of the forthcoming Notes/Domino version 9.0 release.

Reynolds-Lair said those moves wouldn’t have happened without some tactful urging by herself and Steve Pitcher, another Power Systems Champion (and enterprise systems manager of Scotsburn Dairy) who campaigned loudly for these next-gen Notes/Domino products to run on the platform.

The iChamp then gave an additional pitch: “The other ones that in the future I’d like to see on i are Worklight and Connections and Forms Experience Builder,” Reynolds-Lair told Liu. “. . . part of what we do as Champions is talk to IBM about what [we] as customers need and also to spread the word about the wonders of the IBM i and all the collaborative software” from IBM.

As it turns out, IBM has committed to running IBM Connections on the platform. Native support for Traveler and Connections were listed in the “statement of direction” component of the IBM i 7.1 TR6 announcement letter. The IBM Connect bit was filmed before the TR6 announcement.

This is real progress for organizations that run Notes/Domino on IBM i. Traveler will be a big boost to companies wanting to push corporate email out to smartphones running iOS, Android, Blackberry OS, and Windows Phone. IBM Connections, likewise, will allow next-generation collaboration via Web spaces, blogs, wikis, forums, and shared libraries to occur within the IBM i server.

Worklight is a mobile application framework for creating and running HTML5, hybrid, and native apps on smartphones and tablets. It includes an Eclipse-based development tool, a Java-based server component, a device management console, and various connectors for hooking into backend systems.

Forms Experience Builder, meanwhile, is a tool designed to speed the creation of Web forms. The software allows Web designers to assemble application screens, capture data into a relational database, and orchestrate notifications using an integrated workflow mechanism.

Pitcher had also campaigned to have Sametime Mobile Manager running natively on the platform. Let’s hope IBM keeps the innovations coming for IBM i.

You can view the entire Reynolds-Lair interview at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fR83gwjt_A.