Lotus Development Corp yesterday fleshed out its plans to allow the firm’s Domino server technology to Web-enable Lotus Notes and denied vaporware effects from Netscape Communication Corp’s recent intranet product announcements would stall sales of Notes 4.5, due out in late summer. Lotus said its first Domino II Server will ship in early 1997 and feature a Notes-based object store, enabling storage and retrieval of HTML pages, Java and Lotuscript applets, forms, views and other objects through support for the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Other servers for mail and directory services will follow. Lotus is positioning Domino to transform Notes into an intranet Web applications server (CI No 2,922). Referring to Netscape’s promise last week to deliver Intranet servers in 18 months, Lotus said yesterday, This vision of their product looks a lot like the product we’re delivering today. The company says it expects Notes will continue to grow 300% to 400% year on year despite the threat of competitive products from Netscape and Microsoft Corp. Lotus also announced Net.Presence, a set of graphical Web application development tools – sort of templates to build Web sites – which will ship in its Notes 4.5 client. Meanwhile, the company’s due to start beta testing 4.5. The new version is intended to offer increased support for mobile users; direct access to the Web; support for Java applets, Netscape-compatible plug-ins; and the POP 3 mail and Secure Sockets Layer 3.0 security services.
