Lotus posts Notes 5 and Domino betas

Lotus has posted public betas of version 5 of Notes, Domino and Domino Designer on its website for public downloading. Notes is an integrated email and collaboration client with a browser and messaging. Domino is a family of servers for secure enterprise messaging and Web applications. Domino Designer is a Web application development environment. The technical improvements in Notes/Domino 5 are focussed on native HTML and MIME support, better browsing, email management, calendaring and scheduling. The Domino server platform is said to have better management, "push" capability for new application dissemination, a scalable LDAP directory that can have more than a million entries, and CORBA interfaces. All the reports seen make a great issue out of the public beta being two weeks later than announced. It is strange how products that are a few years late, from a certain large software company, are not castigated for lateness in the same way. The announcement was made on the first day of Lotusphere conference in Berlin, which started yesterday. Presumably the final release of the products will be available at least by the Orlando Lotusphere in January -- release in the fourth quarter had been announced. Lotus said there is, or will be, versions available for 32-bit Windows, Solaris/SPARC, AIX, HP-UX, Power Mac and OS/2 -- but not NetWare, which Lotus has decided not to support. Novell was unable to comment on the reason for the decision made by Lotus earlier in the year. Support for Microsoft's IIS is mentioned, but not for Netscape products. Pricing information has not yet been disclosed. ®