At the annual Lotusphere Conference, IBM (NYSE:IBM) unveiled plans to help businesses build a smarter workforce by providing software services to help people work together across the enterprise, on the move and via the cloud.

IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced LotusLive, a cloud-based portfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business. LotusLive will extend customers' current investments and link to everyday business services.

In advance of its annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida next week, IBM announced that the number of global Lotus Notes licenses has reached 145 million, up five million, including purchases by many industry leaders exchanging Microsoft licenses for Lotus collaboration software.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Global Hyatt Corporation will standardize on IBM Lotus Notes and Domino and Lotus Sametime software for unified communications and collaboration among its thousands of employees and its 365 managed, operated and franchised hotels in 45 countries.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today extended its most widely used software, Lotus Notes, to new markets through delivery as a hosted service, Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM) (TSX: RIM) are taking mobile work far beyond email by delivering to mainstream business professionals the full line of Web 2.0-powered IBM Lotus(R) collaboration software and information on demand on the market-leading BlackBerry(R) platform.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today 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.

IBM today announces a new version of its electronic forms software that allows customers and partners to take advantage of rich, interactive, open-standards based electronic forms in a Web 2.0 environment.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Lotus Symphony, IBM's new, free office productivity software, has been downloaded by more than 100,000 registered business and consumer users in its first week.

Goodness knows why it has taken so long for IBM Symphony to come out, but IBM finally seems to have woken up to the fact that throwing all its weight behind ODF is much better than vaguely supporting it:

Today at the VoiceCon 2007 conference, IBM unveiled the next phase of its unified communication and collaboration (UC2) strategy by expanding its IBM Lotus Sametime software into a product family that will include new telephony integratiIBM Lotus on software.

IBM and Novell are beefing up their existing partnership on two fronts with Linux distributor Novell increasing support for IBM's Notes desktop collaboration software and its open-source WAS CE (WebSphere Application Server Community Edition).