France Telecom and Lotus Development Corp have finally confirmed that they are working together to produce a public service using the Lotus Notes program. The terms of the work remain vague however, with the agreement stating only that the two will enable Lotus Notes to run over Numeris, France Telecom’s ISDN service, and to define applications that integrate the phone company’s viewdata, paging, facsimile, X400 Electronic Data Interchange and other services – which sounds pretty wide-ranging. On top of that, the partners will look at joint marketing. But given Notes’ powerful groupware capabilities, the applications that the companies are looking at seem rather basic. Jim Dinsmore, Lotus’s international manager for strategic alliances, talked about dial-up access to newsletters and the ability to search public databases – the kind of functions that are already provided by operators like Compuserve and CIX. However, Lotus’s strong suit is its intention to provide the remote client machines with a cut-down version of Notes. A public Notes should boost Lotus’s software sales substantially, as those that want to connect to the public services find that a Notes client is required. Although the initial applications do not look particularly inspired, the client-server approach will enable some nice touches in data formatting and search. Likewise, Lotus says that an intelligent front-end will enable multi-media applications over ISDN. France Telecom should have its first public Notes offering on stream within six months, according to Dinsmore. Staying with the multi-media theme, Danvers, Massachusetts-based Picturetel Corp has become a Lotus Notes alliance partner. The videoconferencing specialist will add live visual communications capability to the software and has demonstrated the first limited integration, showing a version of the application that can dial a videoconference.
