"Lotus Expeditor is a flexible client infrastructure for composite applications that brings together a wide range of application types, from .NET, Eclipse and Java to Web 2.0," said Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and interaction services, as IBM announced Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1 software – new technology designed to arm professionals with the ability to mash-up information from different sources to create just-in-time applications.

"Mashups" blend Web services like news feeds, weather reports, maps or traffic conditions, with enterprise content and services from databases, spread sheets and documents, helping to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific, timely business needs.

"While other middleware provides only a small subset of APIs on a mobile device," Bowden continued, "Expeditor software can extend most of what is found on the desktop to an online or offline environment, creating more powerful and flexible applications."

For developers, Lotus Expeditor is designed to provide an easy way to create integrated mashups independent of the implementation technology on the client, delivering new capabilities such as aggregation of both browser-based as well as non-browser applications in mashups. This helps reduce the need to go back and forth between different applications on the desktop.

Lotus Expeditor provides this mashup capability for Lotus Notes 8 and Domino 8, the newest version of IBM's collaboration platform available to customers this month.

Enhanced new security features give administrators control of the desktop, which means end users have role-based controlled access to the applications.

Lotus Expeditor software is based on open standards such as OSGi, the open source Eclipse framework, and serves as the foundation technology for a number of other IBM offerings including Lotus Sametime 7.5 and Lotus Notes 8. The software has been designed to easily integrate with key IBM products such as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Sametime, IBM Workplace Forms and Lotus Notes 8 software.

IBM decribed the key features as including:

A server-managed composite platform -- spanning desktop and mobile -- that integrates and aggregates applications and information: Using Lotus Expeditor software, developers can incorporate elements from disparate sources including Microsoft .NET, Swing, native, Eclipse-based components, Flash, and components that have the business processes contained in back- office applications. Workers can be more productive with quick and easy access to aggregated applications on the client.

Integration with real-time collaboration (IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1): Lotus Expeditor includes an embedded version of the Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 client to help developers integrate real-time collaboration with line-of- business applications. This allows them to further create composite applications that embed real-time collaboration and have a custom look and feel. In addition, developers can enable offline support, allowing users to send messages or process information even when disconnected.

Integration with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and IBM WebSphere Portal Express: Developers can use WebSphere Portlet Factory software to rapidly build and deploy portlets that run on the Lotus Expeditor platform, helping to increase the time to value of their rich applications. This same value is extended to the Portal Express product, allowing our small and medium business (SMB) customers to take full advantage of the same benefits offered to our large enterprise accounts.

End to end government-grade mobile security for customers: IBM provides end-to-end security features for managed client apps by coupling capabilities like encryption, authentication, plus the single sign-on features of Lotus Expeditor software with the government grade mobile VPN support provided by IBM Lotus Mobile Connect software. With the recent addition of support for Windows 2003 server in the Lotus Mobile Connect product, SMB customers can benefit from government-grade mobile security features.

The ability to transform Microsoft Visual Basic applications: Expeditor can provide a landing pad for a myriad of end of life Visual Basic applications. Through Lotus Expeditor, developers can host existing VB applications, and incrementally transform them to take advantage of open middleware services. With third party tools provided by IBM Business Partners such as Diamond Edge, they can automate much of the transformation of their VB applications, often using their existing developer skills.