Despite evidence to the contrary in the company’s first quarter results (CI No 2,647), Lotus Development Corp reckons MS-DOS products will not become obsolete overnight and that its Team Computing strategy will revive its flagging fortunes. It says it is unlikely that when Windows95 is launched all current Windows users will automatically upgrade, which would wipe out its market. But the slump in MS-DOS business generally, has badly affected Lotus, which reported $17m losses in the first quarter of this year, accompanied by a drop of 18% in turnover, and the company blamed much of this on the shrinking MS-DOS market. In announcing Word Pro, its renamed, restructured Ami Pro word processing software, Lotus said companies that have made a massive investment in Windows will want to get as much out of the operating system for as long as they can and Lotus’s Team Computing strategy is designed to do that. With Word Pro, Lotus believes it can grow its share of the worldwide word processing market up to 10% from 7 % over the next year. Lotus says Word Pro, with its new features, will enable workgroups to automate the collection, distribution and alteration information. And it is Word Pro, or Ami Pro as was, that has undergone the biggest alteration among the company’s suite of products, to fit in with the Team Computing philosophy. Not only has the name been changed (CI No 2,642) but the product has been rebuilt from the ground up in C++ as a 32-bit object-oriented product.
1,500 enhancements
Lotus says it has made 1,500 enhancements. Among the key features are TeamReview and TeamConsolidate. TeamReview enables the originator of a document to limit what colleagues can alter, but multiple editors can read and amend, and append comments to a document. The originator has access to the original and all subsequent versions. TeamConsolidate enables an originater to merge all editions of a piece of work in one document, review each change and select which alterations should be kept. Word Pro is said to scale to make use of whichever communications infrastructure the team uses; it doesn’t need Notes to operate. Other enhancements are document versioning to enable multiple copies of a document to be stored in one file without the file expanding appreciabl y; SmartMasters, a feature taken from Freelance Graphics, style templates; SmartCorrect automatically corrects commonly mispelled words like abd and teh; Divider Tabs, like those in 1-2-3, to aid navigation and management through particularly large files; Object Linking & Embedding support; LotusScript 3.0 object oriented scripting langauge; and the ability to share data between Notes and Word Pro. The spell checker has been improved to highlight all misspelled words and proper nouns at the same time which is claimed makes it much faster to correct a document. And it also attaches a document dictionary to each file, which enters proper nouns once they have been checked, so that they do not have to be checked again. And to further enhance Word Pro’s usability in team situations, users can import Word, Wordperfect and DCA/RFT documents, edit thrm within Word pro and then save them in the other word processors. Word Pro also supports Standardised Generalised and HyperText mark-up languages. Word Pro will be available for Windows 3.1 first in July and Lotus says that it will have a Windows95 version ready to ship 60 days after Microsoft Corp finally gets to deliver its new operating system. There will also be an OS/2 version. Part of Lotus’s overall Team Computing strategy is developing interfaces for its desktop products that are all similar and so easier to use. Features such as menus will be common across all products. And it’s introducing context-sensitive Smart Icons. Lotus is also counting on support from its various partners, such as IBM Corp, which will bundle Notes Express with OS/2 Warp, Hewlett-Packard Co, which is recommending Notes and cc:Mail to its customers, and Sun Microsystems Inc which will bundle Notes server and client modules on forthcoming Sparc
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