What is IBM Verse?
IBM Verse is a successful bid to show that e-mail can be fun, engaging, and highly efficient. Over the past decade, IBM Lotus Notes became gradually more outdated in what the modern users expect from their email’s user experience. So, Verse came to save the day.
IBM Verse wants to provide you an e-mail service that is self-organizing and that makes tasks easier to prioritize, with people rather than messages as the basic unit of communication. You can view the content that is shared between team members without downloading them, which can come in handy when you are not at your computer but still need to work.
IBM is also trying to lend a hand to its users by offering them access to Watson. This new search-and-classify functionality will “[enable] users to query Watson on a given topic and receive a direct reply with answers ranked by degree of confidence.”
One might argue that Verse tries to imitate Gmail, by attempting to categorize incoming e-mail using the e-mail’s content and the user’s behaviour with those emails. One strength that Verse takes pride in is its security, and IBM makes sure to stake the claim that it as better than Google’s.
It is designed to replace the old-looking Notes, helping the user with a new self-organizing inbox. IBM Verse is based on the IBM/Lotus Domino mail server system, as expected. It stands to reason that if you are a Lotus Notes user, and have not made the switch, you might at least consider it soon.
Despite the fact that IBM Notes users are a major audience for Verse, IBM offers Verse to anyone who wants it, offering you a great service for your business. In the end, just as its predecessor, IBM Verse is much more than just e-mail, as we will detail next.
So, what can I do with IBM Verse?
Here are some of the most important things that Verse brings to the table.
Scalable: Buy what you need today, and Verse grows with you
You might not know today what you will need tomorrow. In that regard, IBM Verse comes as a stand-alone tool or as part of more feature-packed editions of the Connections Cloud. That way, you can adjust the tool to what you need, going up or, if needed, down, leaving some components out if you don’t need them anymore.
Verse On-Premises: Modern Email on IBM Domino Infrastructure
You might not want to host your email in IBM’s cloud, despite the security that IBM offers, but still want to enjoy Verse and all of its capabilities. You can go with IBM Verse On-Premises and host it on your own servers or with your favorite hosting provider.
Like mobile? No problem!
Today, there is more need to accommodate the ability to work from anywhere, and from multiple devices than ever before. So, Verse adapted and you get the IBM Verse Mobile app to help you check your emails on any mobile device anywhere you need it.
Who says you have to be on your desktop computer to work? You can view emails, events and action updates, manage your to-do lists, and chat and keep track of the people you work with closely from your favorite tablet or a smartphone.
Verse mobile also comes with a widget that will keep you updated without you having to be in the app. You’ll also be notified about upcoming meetings, e-mails received, so you don’t miss out anything even when you are away from your desk.
Keep Track of the People on Your Team.
To help you manage your productivity even more, IBM Verse’ built-in IBM Watson AI will identify the people you work with most closely, so notifications from them get your attention sooner. If you need to quickly look up your recent conversations with your team you just need to tap on a photo in the Important People tab from the app or widget.
Connect with Meetings and File Sharing
You can be in touch with your team at all time with Verse’s ability to join screen share meetings and share files from the cloud.
IBM Verse’s components: Something better than just an e-mail client
You might expect that Verse simply comes to offer you yet another email client. But Verse aims to be much more than this. Even the email component is designed to automatically identify the people you work with on a daily basis and points them out to you. Because of its learning capabilities, it will change and update your most important people and things as they change. It really makes prioritizing the million things you have to do a lot easier.
Those nice little circles will help you write an email to your team members faster, and check their contact details without having to search them. The thing you might like a lot, if you are a mess at organizing e-mails, it that you can also get to see the emails you’ve exchanged with my team members, with just a click. And that helps a lot when you have to manage hundreds of emails on a daily basis. You can also send an e-mail faster by selecting the little bullet with your teammates’ initials.
You’ll notice that next to the Inbox circle you have two more circles that will help you. You will also notice the new e-mail threads. You can easily check all the replies an e-mail received from all the people it was addressed to, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Calendar
Well, we live in a world where meetings are not only held in person but more often than not, through a web conference call. It’s good to have a tool that keeps all your meeting commitments nicely organized. IBM Verse has an excellent Calendar component to help you organize your day and just reminding you that you have something important to get done. You can also change your settings to busy when creating a new meeting, so your team does not bother you.
IBM Verse Calendar has many more features to help prioritize your day.
Having the Show time zones option will help you if you work with people around the world, so you can make sure that you don’t send an invite to somebody for a meeting at 12 AM for instance.
People
If you need to locate a person fast, someone who is not on the list of people you work closely with, the People tab will help you find your contacts neatly displayed in alphabetic order. Just to make sure everything is easily accessible here also, you can view your contacts by name, e-mail or company.
Notebook
There will be times when you will want to share documents with your team. You can easily create and send documents using the Notebook component of IBM Verse. For an even better organization, you can sort your documents by categories, thus simplifying the access to your notes.
Verse On-Premises
If you are an IBM Domino customer and want to keep your server while enjoying the best of IBM’s enterprise email and productivity suite, then IBM Verse On-Premises is the answer to your problems. You get all the rich features and benefits of Verse while using a single, collaborative on-premise or hosted environment.
What Does Verse On-Premises Give You?
Ease of access
IBM Verse On-Premises can be accessed securely offline via your browser. You can even choose not to deploy a rich client for enterprise email.
Future features
Verse On-Premises comes with integration and extensibility features designed to match any cloud capabilities Verse will develop as it evolves into an even better tool.
Cost effectiveness
IBM Verse On-Premises gives its users all the great functionality, while enabling you to use your existing investments in Domino. You can access your Domino apps without much fuss through IBM Client Application Access or IBM Notes.
Bottom line, if you liked Notes, but want an upgrade, then Verse is the tool for you. And, if you would like to try a complete smart office and productivity tool, then take Verse for a spin.