New Notes/Domino Versions Take On Exchange

IBM on Wednesday rolled out its long-awaited Lotus Notes and Domino 7.0, each laced with heavy doses of collaboration features and productivity enhancements in hopes of bolstering the two products' competitive positioning against Microsoft Exchange.

Notes 7 contains more than 100 new features that are largely designed to help users better manage growing volumes of data coming from multiple sources and to work more efficiently.

Some of those new features include visual indicators that help users organize and manage their inboxes by highlighting urgent messages, and the ability to differentiate between group e-mail and messages that are intended for specific users.

The product also has a new memory function that automatically saves and returns to open documents and applications upon shutdown and restart. Company officials contend this gives users more mobility without having to be concerned about losing data or experiencing downtime.

As for Domino, IBM has added Web services capabilities that are designed to help ISVs better carry out horizontal-application integration, thereby making better use of their existing Domino applications. The company has also added an optional capability for Domino users to integrate their applications with DB2.

"The optional integration for Domino 7 users allows them to post some of their applications natively on DB2 while preserving the Domino-based access control and Domino-based replication abilities. It also gives developers access to relational constructs to improve ad hoc querying and to use SQL commands," says Ken Bisconti, vice president of IBM's Workplace, Portal and Collaboration business.

Some analysts believe IBM's timing to market with Notes/Domino 7 is fortuitous given what they see as a growing demand for a stronger marriage between collaboration and communications among developers and users both large and small.

"Notes/Domino to an extent is now resurgent because of this demand for integrated communications and collaboration, because [IBM] sees it more and more as the way to make users more productive and the business more responsive," says Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst with The Burton Group, Midvale, Utah.

During the past three years, according to O'Kelly, Lotus has redoubled its focus on Notes/Domino, and some of the improvements included in Version 7, such as server consolidation and management, reflect that redoubled effort.

"But, as importantly, [IBM is] indicating to the market that [Notes] has a future and will continue investing in it. If you go back three to five years ago, IBM was suggesting Notes didn't have much of a future, that it was a late-life product in harvest mode," O'Kelly says.

As witness to IBM's claims about Notes/Domino 7 is the Holland Co., a small Illinois-based railway manufacturing company. Holland says it migrated from Microsoft's Exchange to Notes for a variety of reasons, including Microsoft's decision to end support for Exchange under Windows NT, and the attractiveness of a product that allowed its large number of remote workers to be productive offline.

"There are several critical apps we have extended to work with Notes, and I didn't want a platform where every few years I would have to rewire major pieces of them. With Notes, I felt that would not be a problem," says Jim Tieri, director of information technology at Holland.

Holland, now using Notes 6.5.3, is using a CRM application built by local business partner The PSC Group, and plans to move that application and others to Notes 7.0 "quickly," Tieri says.

Both Lotus Notes and Domino 7 are available immediately, with Domino Server pricing starting at $1,145 per processor and Notes software priced at $101 per client. Domino 7 is available for Windows 2000, Windows 2003, IBM's iSeries zSeries, Sun's Solaris 9 and Linux on Intel. Versions for Red Hat Enterpise Linux 4 and Sun Solaris 10 will be available in 30 days.

Notes 7 works with Windows 2000 and XP, with a version for the Macintosh planned for a future release of Notes, a company spokesman said.