Lotus introduces its long-awaited upgrade

A year and a half after its first promised arrival date, and seven weeks after its launch in the US, IBM subsidiary Lotus finally introduced its much-anticipated upgrade to its Notes/Domino groupware to the Irish market on Tuesday.

The upgrade, known as Release Five or R5, is Lotus's bid to retain a strong presence in a market it more or less created with its original product, Lotus Notes: corporate e-mail and groupware. But with the introduction of its Exchange program, Microsoft has energetically snapped at Lotus's heels, and Lotus faces other eager competitors as well in what has become a lucrative and highly competitive sector. As the name suggests, groupware products enable clusters of people within larger organisations to work together by connecting them into a network. The software manages messaging, documents and other types of data and is designed to allow groups to collaborate on projects and to take information generated by individuals and groups, classify it, and then make it searchable and retrievable.

The new release, which was originally code-named Maui, lets users access its functions through a Web browser interface and also supports scheduling, news groups, and Internet browsing. Using the suite of R5 programs, users can also create documents or Websites in HTML, or hypertext markup language, the language used to construct Web pages.

"The important thing for companies is they don't have to buy an expensive client for every machine [a software application which allows an individual computer to access programs run from a central computer, or server]. They just use a browser," said Mr Tommy Drummond, Lotus business development manager for Ireland.

Lotus is also positioning R5 squarely as a "knowledge management" product, a trendy new category of software programs for larger organisations which generate plenty of information - increasingly in electronic form, as documents, reports, email, and Web pages - but find it difficult to allow other employees to sort and access it.

This is especially true if the person who generated the data to begin with leaves the company, as often happens in today's more fluid job markets, said Ms Elaine Stephen, general manager for Europe product development for Lotus Ireland.

"Companies need to either retain their people or find ways so that knowledge doesn't leave, and instead becomes an asset," she said.

Microsoft is also targeting Exchange for the knowledge management market, the company's first foray into that arena.

Despite R5's delays, Lotus crucially is still able to position the product well in advance of Microsoft's rollout of its much-delayed corporate-level operating system Windows 2000, formerly known as Windows NT.

Many companies will be tempted to use Exchange if they are also installing Windows 2000. But the system's delay creates an opportunity for Lotus and IBM.