Lotus Development Corp has begun ships of its new Lotus Notes group communications product, which is designed to enable people to create and access shared information using personal computers over local and wide area networks. It is designed to be tailored to meet a variety of shared information needs, including document-oriented applications such as customer tracking, status report-ing, project management, information distribution, discussions and electronic mail. It is based on the client-server computing model, and the Notes client has an intuitive graphical user interface that runs under OS/2 and Presentation Manager, and under MS-DOS with Microsoft Windows. The server runs under OS/2 with Novell, 3Com or IBM network operating systems. It support import and export of files with widely-used word processing, spreadsheet, graphics and database packages, needs 80286 for client and server, and starts at $62,500.
