Say goodbye to the database as the centre of the enterprise – we are entering a new comms-centred view of the world says John Landry, executive vice-president and chief technologist with Lotus Development Corp’s Lotus Communications. Last month saw Landry lay out his wares before an admiring group of users and expound on the extent to which Lotus’ future is bound up with local and wide area networking. Landry oozes a visionary enthusiasm, whether he is talking about new extensions to the Lotus Notes workgroup package or the more esoteric area of pocket computers and how they link into the rest of the business. Remotes, as he calls them, have interested Lotus for a long time – back in 1985, the company was offering share price quotations delivered to pocket terminals via FM radio station sidebands following its acquisition of San Mateo, California-based Dataspeed Inc (CI No 272), and the Cambridge, Massachusetts company is excited by Hewlett-Packard Co’s tiny HP95LX handheld, on which it offers 1-2-3. The point is, says Landry, that remotes are being under-used today and have yet to be incorporated into business computing. Client server is not far reaching enough, says Landry, it doesn’t cope with remotes. Instead, the industry is choosing to ignore them or put personal information managers on them.
Notes
Landry believes that they should be fully networked and says that later this year, a product will be launched that fits both the Hewlett-Packard machine and a pager so that up to 32Kb of cc:Mail or Notes mail text can be received. Next year this will be extended to provide full two-way transmission of text. Back in the office, Lotus is still relying on Notes, and the company chose last month’s session to demonstrate image processing and multimedia additions to its flagship product. The document imaging module, to be ready in the third quarter, was co-developed with Eastman Kodak Co, which has been working on image enhancement, manipulation and compressed storage facilities. Video-enabled Notes is further away, mostly, say the Lotus developers, because of the lack of standards to drive personal computer-based video boards.
By Chris Rose
But why on earth, in the real world, would someone want to embed a piece of video inside a Notes document? Landry argues persuasively, saying ..information is of use to more people than just me, it is useful to others within Lotus, and to our partners. A roar of audience approval endorsed him with a demonstration of two embedded pieces of video – one showing Bill Gates enthusiastically endorsing OS/2 as the platform for the 90’s in 1989, the other, a more recent broadcast in which he denigrated it. That there is little love lost between Lotus and Microsoft Corp is beyond question. But what of public Notes servers? We have reported in the past that Lotus is keen to persuade operators (France Telecom has been mentioned) to set up public dial-in services based on Notes. No comment from France Telecom, but Landry says the work on producing public Notes services is well advanced and we should expect major announcements in the fourth quarter – Seybold and Gartner already publish results on Notes, but work apparently needs to be completed on handling large databases and improving connections to X25 networks before trials of a generalised public service can get underway. Finally, and most impressively, the company gave a demonstration of a pre-alpha version of a new package called Notebook, an ingenious front-end application builder designed to integrate information from disparate databases. It’s not easy to describe, but anyone that has tinkered with Apple’s HyperCard package will have a general feel for it. Application designers can draw tables on the screen and link them so that they are automatically filled in by a back-end database. Lotus reckons that it will be able to support more than 20 databases by the time the product ships in the first quarter of next year, which positions it squarely against more grandiose attempts to emulate IBM Corp’s Information Warehouse. The mos
t innovative aspect of Notebook is the speed with which applications can be constructed. The package enables links to be made between buttons, fields and tables by clicking and dragging.
Bill Gates
A term entered in one field can be directed automatically towards a separate table where it becomes part of a search. One of the resultant entries in this table could then be directed to yet another, linked to a different database. The technique sounds complex, but when demonstrated, it looked both powerful and simple. The result of all this technology, according to Landry, should be that long-awaited flattening of the organisational structure whereby layers of middle management are pruned away. We’ve heard that one before, but he is adamant workgroup computing is where business benefits will come true. Its the pay-off, he says. Until now, personal computers have been good for personal productivity, but what has been the pay-off for corporate productivity? Combine Notes and personal remotes and you reach the point where everyone can make informed decisions based on a worldwide view of what the organisation is up to. And failing that they can always re-run old videos of Bill Gates.
