Lotus Development Corp is due to begin shipping its InterNotes Web Publisher and InterNotes News, this week. Currently in at a 100 beta sites, InterNotes Web Publisher enables users to publish information created in Notes on the World Wide Web. InterNotes News provides bi-directional access to Usenet News from Notes. Lotus believes that companies will increasingly begin to establish Web sites and want software that makes the maintenance of these sites easy and cheap. InterNotes Web Publisher, announced at LotusSphere earlier in the year (CI No 2,495), uses Corporate Software Inc technology to convert Notes documents and databases into Hypertext Mark-up Language. The process of passing information to the server can be automated. The first release is for Windows NT, with OS/2 to follow. InterNotes News uses Network News Transfer Protocol to exchange articles between Notes and Unix news servers and will also run under Windows NT, and then OS/2. InterNotes Web Publisher costs $7,500 and InterNotes News $2,500. As for Notes 4.0 itself, the speculation that the purchase of Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based EdgeResearch Inc with its hiTest technology (CI No 2,470), might hasten its appearance, has proven wrong and users will still have to wait until the second half of next year to see the product. While stressing that things might still change, Lotus last week highlighted at its European Technology Conference in Brighton some of the improvements it has made, which are aimed to make Notes cheaper, easier and more robust to use, and also designed to push user figures into the tens of millions from the current 1.5m base. The hiTest application programming interfaces have been added for C and Visual Basic, there is also a C++ interface, and ones for most kind of messaging application programming interfaces. This, and the addition of LotusScript, is part of the company’s attempt to develop Notes into a fully fledged development environment. For the end users Notes is being equipped with a standard, three-pane interface that will feature across the product line. Electronic mail support has been improved with agents that can deal with mail when users are on holiday, prioritise incoming messages or delegate mail. For mobile uers, there are location configurations that automatically enable ports needed at different user locations and activate appropriate dialling rules. There is better replication management for users on the move, with stacked replication so that only the replica at the location is viewable, and field replication, so that only the altered part of documents are transmitted to the user, saving on telephone time. A centralised interface, NotesView, based on HP OpenView, has been added for administrators as has Simple Network Management Protocol capabilities to enable ad minstrators to monitor, tune and diagnose remotely. Lotus adds that more users can now be attached to single servers, but is not matching this claim with a figure. And it says that Notes 4.0 will run in symmetric multiprocessing environments, with a single server being capable of carrying out multiple replication.
