Lotus roadmaps full J2EE 1.3 support

Lotus Software pushed squarely into the web services arena yesterday when it laid out a roadmap that will result in the company offering full support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.3.

At the same time, the IBM software unit used its Lotusphere 2002 conference to announce the availability of the pre release beta of Notes and Domino 6, ahead of the final products' expected appearance in the third quarter of this year.

Michael Lorio, director of advanced collaboration for Lotus, said that the decision to offer full support for J2EE was part of the vendor's drive to increase its product set's collaborative capabilities. Lorio said J2EE was already supported in some of the products within Lotus' portfolio, for example Lotus Workflow. Making the formal commitment to fully implementing J2EE, "sends a message to our partners of where we're going."

While the company had built a highly integrated product for the enterprise he said, companies needed to be able to collaborate with partners, customers and suppliers. The company has not set a timescale for rolling out J2EE support in its core Notes and Domino software except to say it will be in the version which comes after version 6.

Yesterday, the company unveiled the general release beta of version 6 of Notes and Domino. The latest beta features the full feature set due in the final release version which should appear in the third quarter. There had been speculation the product would appear in the second quarter, but Lorio insisted the company had never set a firm date.

Lotusphere saw a rash of other announcements. The company is revamping its services strategy for Lotus, with the launch of IBM Software Services for Lotus, which will work side by side with Lotus partners. Lorio said the aim was to increase the focus on deployment of Lotus products. At the same time, the company has announced partnerships with Cisco Systems Inc and Captaris Inc to make Notes compatible with their unified messaging systems.

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