“People just wanted one place to find a Notes application that fit their needs.  We started NotesAppStore.com to provide a simple way to find solutions and their company websites without having to sort through a ton of search results pages.    They also wanted some input from the Notes community whether the application was reliable and customer support readily available so we added user reviews as well.”

Apple launched their app store for the iPhone and developers continue to add thousands of application per day.   With fewer developers for Lotus Notes market, the need for an application marketplace is even greater.

According to Mayflower Software’s Frank Paolino there may be a new email virus emerging just in time for the holiday shopping season.

“We detected over 520,000 new virus variants in a single day! Because we are watching email patterns worldwide, we detect most new viruses outbreaks solely due to their email distribution patterns, and often before they have been given an “official” name.”

IBM is claiming that it is now signing up roughly 200 Microsoft partners a month to sell the latest iteration of the Notes franchise, which today is called Lotus Foundations. The opportunity that IBM is trying to exploit is twofold. The first concerns missteps made by Microsoft that has left partners with nothing to sell while they wait for Windows 7 and the arrival of Microsoft Exchange 2010. Customers have summarily rejected Windows Vista, which leaves little opportunity to sell a Microsoft Office upgrade. And nobody really wants to upgrade their messaging platform when they all know that Microsoft Exchange 2010 will be out sometime in the next six months. Taken together, this creates a window of opportunity for IBM to at least get a hearing about selling Lotus Foundations on top of a new self-managing Linux server implementation.

The self-managing capability of Lotus Foundations is cornerstone on which IBM is resting the second element of it renewed offensive against Microsoft. Lotus Foundations is based on Linux server technology that IBM picked up when it acquired Net Integration Technologies (Netix) in early 2008. Netix built a Linux distribution that came integrated with a host of autonomic tools that made the platform self-healing. Any time there is a problem with the server, the entire system just reboots itself and restores all the original settings automatically. Similarly, every time a patch is delivered, the system reboots a whole new instance of the operating system, versus trying to layer in a patch on top of a running application.

Lotus Foundations Screenshot

Password Protector  is a single notes database (application) that lets you store all of your passwords, encrypted, so no one can see them, even if the database is accessed by others or your machine is stolen. Better than using Notepad for storing passwords. Your Notes ID is the single password that you need to remember. With that, you have access to the entire database.

You can share a password with multiple people, or it can be exclusively yours. You can use one database for company shared information and another for personal information. We replicate them across servers, so if your machine dies, all you need is your Notes ID.

Mayflower is offering Password Protector as a free download here.     Check it out and let us know what you think.