IBM Corp. made several announcements Tuesday at its PartnerWorld conference in Las Vegas designed to extend the reach of its Lotus Workplace platform both to small and midsize businesses and to partner companies looking to build vertical solution offerings on Workplace.

IBM is joining with AT&T Corp. to bundle the Lotus Workplace Services Express product with AT&T's business IP services.

Known as IBM Workplace Services Express with AT&T Managed Internet Service, the new offering is designed for companies with 1,000 to 1,500 employees, according to Michael Loria, director of business partners and product marketing at IBM's Lotus Software division.

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The offering provides customers with a portal interface and access to services for document sharing, storage and management, plus portlets for messaging applications such as e-mail and instant messaging.

The bundle installs on a single IBM xSeries eServer and supports both Windows or Linux-based servers as well as Windows or Linux browser-based clients.

Read more here about IBM's announcement of its new enablement templates and midyear metrics.

IBM has no plans to offer e-mail as part of the bundle.

"We may do that in the future, but we think pretty much most of the marketplace has mail at this point. This will allow them to get into collaboration and IM," Loria said.

IBM separately on Tuesday announced Workplace Services Express bundled with the iSeries 520 server, the entry server in the iSeries line. That bundle will target a similar size market as the AT&T bundle, Loria said.

Click here to read more about IBM's development of a new model for delivering hosted software.

IBM also announced that is delivering new deployment options for its IBM Workplace for Healthcare Clinicians and IBM Workplace for Retail Store Operations solutions that are built on Workplace Services Express.

And it has made available the IBM Workplace Solutions Catalog as an online guide for IBM customers and business partners to access tools, technologies, resources, templates and portlets that are available to build and deploy role-based vertical solution on Workplace.

The catalog is available now and can be accessed at no cost.

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