IBM hopes to add Lotus Workplace-like collaboration capabilities to its Rational Team tools offering in late-2006, IBM Rational GM Daniel Sabbah said on Monday. Following his keynote speech during the IBM Rational Software Development Conference in Las Vegas, Sabbah elaborated on Lotus-Rational integration plans. Noting that large communities of developers are collaborative groups, Sabbah said IBM will start more aggressive integration of Lotus capabilities into Rational. Lotus offers capabilities such as Instant Messaging, information-sharing and document portfolio management. Incorporating these capabilities will be a boon to information-sharing by Team users, according to Sabbah. “Today, they have to share that information by picking up the telephone, by trying to understand what somebody else wrote,” without the benefit of an instant connection, Sabbah said. Team-based development capabilities also are planned as improvements to the company’s “Atlantic” tools platform initially released in December 2004, Sabbah said. Sabbah, a legacy IBMer, now is in charge of Rational, which merged with IBM more than two years ago. Mike Devlin, a Rational co-founder, is retiring. But Sabbah stressed everything is OK internally with the move. “It was a very friendly merger,” Sabbah said. Software Development