Lotus Overhaul s Notes

By Justin Hibbard

BM's Lotus Development division will introduce a radically overhauled Notes client, a more scalable Domino server, and a more open Notes development environment at this week's Lotusphere 98 conference in Orlando, Fla.

The enhancements are aimed at maintaining Lotus' top spot in the messaging and groupware market. The company sold 10.5 million Notes clients last year, exceeding the 8 million it had predicted at last year's Lotusphere.

To compete with Microsoft Outlook and Netscape Communicator, Lotus will introduce Notes 5.0, which the company says integrates information from multiple sources better than any competing product. "The Notes client become s an integration point not only for messaging and groupware but for Web information, as well," says Lotus president Jeff Papows.

The new user interface will present hypertext links to E-mail messages, tasks, calendars, Domino applications, and Web sites in one window. In addition, it will borrow the backward and forward buttons used in Web browsers for navigating through linked documents. "Lotus is making a strong statement that it's not willing to cede the Notes client to the browser," says Jamie Lewis, an analyst at the Burton Group, a network computing consulting firm.

Users say they welcome an updated client, but many are more concerned about improving Domino's scalability and performance. "There are a lot of speed issues that Lotus claims will be addressed in the 5.0 version. That's something I'm looking forward to," says Phil Gibson, director of interactive marketing at National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif.

Lotus worked with Microsoft to optimize the performance of Domino 5.0 o n Windows NT, exploiting NT's symmetric multiprocessing features. Domino 5.0 will also offer improved clustering, load balancing, failover support, and input/ output. The server will support a million users in its directory.

Lotus will also ship next month a native, 64-bit version of Domino for IBM's AS/400 midrange server. Domino will integrate with other applications on the AS/ 400, such as IBM's DB2 database.

Domino 5.0 will include a new version of Notes Designer for Domino that will make all the services of Notes applications-including views, navigators, and forms-available to developers as Java components. Developers will be able to deliver all the functionality of Notes applications to Web browsers through Java, JavaBeans, and JavaScript without recoding applications that were designed for the Notes client.

It's a feature that will please users such as Paul Messink, manager for desktop systems at Domino's Pizza Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich. "The thing that's on the top of my list," he says, "is better integration between the world of the Notes client and the world of the browser."

See related story, " Lotus Overhauls Notes ."

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