Lotus Development Corp and Borland International Inc have kissed, made up and are working together to integrate Quattro Pro with Lotus Notes. Last week the two companies completed an acrimonious court battle over Borland’s infringement of aspects of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet display (CI No. 2203). This week Lotus handed Borland the necessary programming interfaces to enable it to give Quattro Pro access to Notes facilities including group information sharing, security, database replication and version control. Notes users will be able to view and annotate Quattro Pro spreadsheets from with Notes, as well as embedding them within compound documents. Lotus says that matters of litigation are kept strictly separate from integration deals, but the latest announcement indicates where Lotus sees its future: the necessity of establishing Notes as a de facto standard for workgroup computing has taken precedence over its desire to protect its share of the spreadsheet market that made Lotus’s name.
