By Jo Maitland
In a surprise move IBM’s Lotus Development Corp has decided to give version 5 of the Notes client away free to private users, a source close to the company has told ComputerWire. For now, the deal is available only to Lotus customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the corresponding Domino server is not part of the offer. Whether this initiative will be rolled out in other countries remains to be seen as Lotus refused to comment on the story ahead of an announcement expected on Friday. Notes R5 was only released six months ago at Lotusphere in Orlando following months of delays which the messaging and groupware firm said were down to guaranteeing no margins for error in the new product. It would seem that in Germany, Austria and Switzerland there were simply no margins. Lotus refused to comment on the battle between Notes and Microsoft’s Exchange product, which is still behind Notes but according to analysts is gaining more customers per month.
According to Lotus, any use of the client for commercial or business purposes, or for any kind of use within a computer network, is not allowed. However, for practical purposes this will be hard for the company to control as anybody can download the software. Notes R5 is purported to handle all the internet’s standard mail protocols (POP3, SMTP, IMAP) and can manage local databases with full text index, which can contain text and multimedia data. Diary and task management are integrated features. In the so-called Private Edition, Lotus will also include preconfigured database applications, such as a video and CD manager, a stock portfolio manager, and a correspondence solution. Lotus also supplies software for synchronizing calendar and email data with the 3Com Palm Computing platform as part of the Private Edition. From August 1 to December 31, 1999, anybody should be able to obtain Lotus Notes R5 Private Edition from the Lotus Web site.
