IBM subsidiary Lotus used its annual user event in Orlando last week to demonstrate its progress towards the next version of Notes – codenamed Hannover – and to show off the first preview of the next Domino release.

Both products are due to ship this year, and are billed as part of IBM’s broader move towards composite applications and service-oriented architectures.

The company also detailed a new version of Sametime, a tool that brought online chat to enterprises long before instant messaging (IM) became a phenomenon. Lotus said it would develop Sametime 7.5 to work with AOL, Yahoo and Google public instant messaging (IM) networks. This will allow Sametime customers to link to a broader universe of clients.

The Sametime release, due in the middle of this year, also adds voice over IP, location awareness and links to multimedia conferencing tools, the company said.

IBM added that Sametime 7.5 would also be the IM client for future versions of its Workplace Collaboration Services. A new 2.6 version of the collaborative environment has just become available, including support for the OpenDocument format, alongside upgrades to Workplace Managed Client and Workplace Designer.

Workplace is shaping up as IBM’s system to break down Notes/ Domino and WebSphere into components and services that are more broadly accessible.

“IBM has for quite some time been talking about componentisation of Lotus assets and contextual collaboration,” said Neil Macehiter of analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton. “In part this is driven by the breadth of portfolio offerings. IBM is trying to disentangle capabilities from WebSphere and Lotus and expose them as web services.”

Partners are also circling around Lotus. Apple said it would support Notes 7 on Intel-based Macs, and firms such as RIM and Nokia have agreed to develop new mobile collaboration solutions.