Business users hungry for taking disparate pieces of data and creating applications to get more business value may get their appetites satisfied when IBM’s Lotus Mashups hits the market later this year.

Lotus Mashups will let users "mash up" various software feeds and widgets to build more valuable applications. Business users will be able to do this without IT personnel holding their hands, IBM officials said.

For example, employees in marketing, sales distribution or business managing will be able to drop data from weather reports, sales figures and inventory into situational applications that can be used when appropriate and easily discarded, Larry Bowden, vice president of portal and Web services interaction at IBM, said during a press briefing at the Lotusphere 2008.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Mozilla browser, the most successful open-source product created from a previous commercial product. For this anniversary, eWeek is taking a look back at some of the key moments in Mozilla’s history.

This week analysts at Kaspersky Lab released a top ten listof "malware miscellany" from last month. The Malware Miscellany list takes a slightly out-of-the-box look at December’s top worms and viruses through categories ranging from "greediest Trojan" to "most common virus/worm family" to the "stealthiest malicious program." Included in the list are links to quick-and-dirty encyclopedia listings for each piece of malware, which provide a short technical description, other known "aliases" and types of behavior.

Migrate your J2EE projects to IBM Lotus Expeditor V6.1 using IBM Lotus Expeditor Toolkit, and then deploy the migrated project on the Lotus Expeditor runtime. This article shows you which steps you need to take to migrate your J2EE projects and which J2EE features are not supported by Lotus Expeditor.

This article presents the IBM Lotus Quickr Search REST service and an example of its use. Learn about an IBM Lotus Sametime plug-in that lets you search for content on the Lotus Quickr server and share it during a conversation through IBM Lotus Sametime Connect or by sending IBM Lotus Notes email.

Mainsoft, a .NET-Java EE interoperability company and IBM partner, previewed its SharePoint Integration Solutions for Notes this week at Lotusphere. Mainsoft’s SharePoint Integration Solutions deliver intuitive, point-and-click access to SharePoint data, such as Office(R) document libraries, contact lists and calendar entries, from within Notes. SharePoint contents are available online or offline and can participate fully in Notes 8 productivity applications. To facilitate collaboration, Notes users can easily store updated documents, lists and calendar entries onto SharePoint sites.

IBM Lotusphere 2008 is the setting for the introduction of new collaboration technologies, but it also affords IBM the opportunity to show off software from its research labs around the world. Here are 10 new technologies that have promise, but don’t get too excited. Some of these products will get rolled into existing IBM offerings–or may never see the light of day at all.

IBM made big advances into the rapidly growing unified communications market by unveiling a range of large client adoptions and major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) embedded software and reseller agreements expanding IBM Lotus Sametime to millions of new users.

Research In Motion previewed BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections–a new software application that runs natively on BlackBerry smartphones to provide mobile users with access to Lotus Connections social software for business. The BlackBerry client application leverages the push-based architecture, security and administration features of BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which provides IT groups with the necessary controls for enabling mobile access to Lotus Connections in the enterprise.

IBM has seen the future, and in its vision, Linux-based servers and desktops will be powering tomorrow’s office with Lotus Notes and Symphony in what it calls an open collaboration client solution.

The IBM open collaboration client solution brings together Lotus Notes; the Lotus Sametime messaging platform; WebSphere Portal; the Lotus Connections social networking software; Lotus Quickr, document management and collaboration software for teams; Lotus Expeditor, an Eclipse-based development environment; and Lotus Symphony. Symphony is essentially OpenOffice with an Eclipse-based user interface. Together these create a server-to-desktop office suite designed to compete with Microsoft’s Windows-only bundle of Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint.

At Lotusphere, IBM revealed that it will be delivering this soup-to-nuts office suite with the three biggest Linux distributions: Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Novell was the first of the Linux companies to join this initiative, in August 2007.