Partners Software Everything You Need - in One Box
Does it seem like anything to do with technology is complicated and hard to understand? Do you have a small business or non profit organizaion with 5 to 100 employees that would benefit from the ability to work more efficiently and collaborate with each other? Relax, IBM has your back. It's called Lotus Foundations.
It's been about two years since IBM purchased a company we'd been dealing with for several years that produced an "everything-in-one-box" Information Technology (IT) solution. IBM paired that solution with their world-renown Domino/Lotus Notes software platform that adds more indepth collaboration capabilities. For example, it also allows us to offer the eProductivity software that runs on Notes to implement David Allen's "Getting Things Done" productivity and time management methods.
What in the box? You could say alphabet soup: DHCP, DNS, Dynamic DNS, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, PHP5, POP3, RAID (1 & 5), SMB, SMTP, SNMP and SQL. But there's more. It's a domain controller for Windows systems providing centralized authentication and authorization for your entire network. It has built-in file backup to hot-swappable hard drives.
You can hook up two different Internet connections (say cable and DSL) and have automatic fail-over in the event the primary connection fails. It also offers optional anti-virus and spam filtering capabilities at very attractive rates. There's a built-in firewall, too.
This server software offering can be deployed on your own server hardware or IBM offers the Lotus Foundations appliance with a couple of unique capabilities. First, the operating system (OS) is stored in flash memory making it effectively hack-proof. Updates are downloaded from the Internet directly to flash and a simply reboot installs the new OS.
Second, there is a front panel display that may be used to shutdown the server gracefully, perform a backup or restore, and see when it's safe to swap the intelligent disk backup (idb) drive. No monitor or keyboard required.
And the best part? All this functionality is easy to manage. So easy, we do it for free for our First Class Support Premier customers. To get the same level of management for a Windows-based server is expensive and could cost you an additional $3,000 to $4,000 a year.