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.