Lotus Foundations is valuable for small businesses who are IT staff challenged

I have had a little down time so I have been able to do some research, and one of the topics I caught myself up on is Lotus Foundations. I am impressed by this application. Over the past year I have heard from many of our General Business customers that they have very limited resources to deploy and manage IT systems for their companies. What is interesting about Foundations is that it is labeled an 'appliance' and contains everything a business would need to set up a secure and backed up simple collaboration environment for companies with employees between 5 - 500 users.

All you need to procure to run this is hardware (and if you want you can get the hardware with this as well)!! It includes the following components:

• operating system (Linux)
  
• collaborative software
• Email, calendar, contacts (Lotus Notes/Domino)
  
• File sharing (FTP)
  
• document editors (Lotus Symphony)
  
• firewalls, antivirus, antispam and VPN software
  
• backup and recovery software
  
• self-governing and healing administration

The installation is very simple and configuration is easy too! Definitely something to consider. The documentation is very easy to follow and here is the home page for Foundations.