Lotus Foundations and Xerox, a match made in heaven!

At the Lotusphere lab event tonight, the Lotus Foundations team held a preview event for Lotus Evangelists like yourself to showcase the limitless possibilities of Lotus Foundations in a small to medium sized business environments (SMBs). One thing you might notice at this event is how much attention Lotus Foundations is getting these days from the the business partner community.

Partners like Lotus 911, Research In Motion (the makers of Blackberry devices), and ShoreTel have been evaluating the platform’s functionality and ease-of-use, and believe it a good platform to reach the SMB market.

At the lab tonight, engineers at IBM and Xerox demonstrated Lotus Foundations ability to enable Xerox’s multi-function printing devices to empower ISVs and VARs to offer better support to the SMB sector.

“With Lotus Foundations, IBM has a simple and secure platform that supports document solutions that involve encoded and image information and is ideal to simply SMB business processes. Combine Foundations and EIP and you will have a complete collaboration infrastructure in which solutions can be prototyped, developed quickly to the SMB market.”

To demonstrate this, Xerox engineers showcased a MFP solution to the blogging community that automatically converted a paper document into a Lotus Symphony document in a matter of few seconds! The solution was able to distinguish charts from data and even formatted it properly. Imagine the possibility of being able to use your multi-function printing devices to scan documents over a network and store it digitally in a secure Lotus Foundations network!

I kid you not, this prototype solution was a immediate hit among the community present who were blogging the event live on their blogs and twitter accounts.

"I just saw someone from Xerox scan in a paper document and it automatically showed up on his screen at his desktop as a Symphony spreadsheet ” – Erica Topolski

“Pardon my language but that is f$#R%#$ awesome!” – Nathon Freeman

“Dude this demo is truly kickass!” – John Rolling

Caleb Barlow, executive for Lotus Foundations, was also excited to announce the wide availability of a VMWare virtualization solution on the platform to allow SMB clients to take advantage of a wide range of applications on Microsoft Windows as well. The VMWare solution is available now for everyone!

Look out for more exciting news tonight about the upcoming Lotus Foundations Branch Office Edition.