R5 well worth the wait, says Lotus
After nearly a year of delays, Lotus last week launched Release 5 (R5) of its popular groupware software Lotus Notes and Domino. The IBM subsidiary claims to have improved the overall infrastructure of Notes and created a new user interface based on Web technology.
R5 has been plagued by several sets of delays due to bug fixing, including an embarrassing last-minute pullback at its annual Lotusphere conference in January. Lotus' Notes and Domino product manager Christopher Crummey believes customers will appreciate the amount of quality testing the company has done.
Already, users have downloaded 200,000 copies of the beta version of the Notes client and Mr Crummey said: 'Customers are already deploying a lot of beta versions of their applications.' There are about 24 million users of the Notes client worldwide, with more than 120,000 users in Hong Kong. Notes still leads Microsoft's Exchange product in the groupware software category - Novell's GroupWise is running third - although sales of Exchange have surpassed Notes in some recent quarters. Microsoft will not release a new Exchange until Windows 2000 is released either later this year or in 2000.
David Su, director of sales and operations for Lotus' greater China group, said many local clients had downloaded the beta version. Among local users of Notes are transport company Crown Worldwide, Standard Chartered Bank and the Hong Kong Government.
Much of the development work on R5 has involved redesigning the user interface to resemble and work like a Web browser.
'We wanted to make the user interface in Release 5 really easy to use. So, we have basically applied the Web standard to the Notes client,' said Mr Crummey.
That also saves time and effort, as Web pages do not need to be redesigned to be displayed properly on Notes-based networks.
Network administrators can also manage a Notes network through a Web browser. As well as making improvements to the Notes client, Lotus says it has improved the Domino server, with increased performance and better integration with existing corporate computing systems.
This is done through Domino Enterprise Connector Services (DECS), which connects the server to both IBM and non-IBM back-end systems, allowing users easier access to data stored on those systems. DECS has been improved in R5 to allow real-time access to data.
Lotus says it has also improved the overall performance of Domino.
Domino runs Windows NT, various flavours of Unix and IBM's AS/400 for mainframes. The Domino Enterprise Server costs $38,961, with an additional $312 per user. The Notes client software starts at $429 per user.
Notes R5, Page 5
