Lotus Development Corp’s chief executive Michael Zisman has laid out the company’s strategy to integrate Notes with the Internet, positioning Notes as a ubiquitous server, combining databases, messaging and World Wide Web server functions in one. The IBM Corp subsidiary also increased the price of the next release of Notes servers while giving the InterNotes Web Publisher 2.0 away for free, where it previously cost around $3,000 and had struggled to gain market share. Release 4.0 of Notes Server is expected in the first quarter of 1996, having been promised by the end of this year. Once it’s out, a package, previously codemaned Spike, that combines the server, an HyperText Transfer Protocol server and a copy of InterNotes will be released. By mid-1996 the company will ship an integrated HyperText Notes server on all current Notes operating systems. All Notes clients from release 4.0 will include the InterNotes Web Navigator browser. Zisman said that the term Web Server would become content-free as everything would be a Web server by default. On the Notes clients, Web access would be embedded in all applications, so Web pages could be accessed anywhere in a Notes application via doc link icons or LotusScript commands. Notes Mail, which features the cc:Mail interface will arrive with Notes Server 4.0. Server prices have shot up to ú341 for a single-processor server and ú1,584 for the multiprocessor version from ú198 per processor. The Notes 4.0 desktop client will cost ú47, representing a 57% price cut on the current version. Jeff Papows, Lotus chief operating officer said this new pricing model is one example of the benefit of our merger with IBM. Zisman said of future Notes users by virtue of the fact that they’re in the Notes database, they’re on the Web.
