IT Factory Targets Domino, Exchange

IT Factory Inc. this week will announce application development tools for its Lotus Development Corp. Domino and Microsoft Corp. Exchange customers.

Both tools, the ITF Tools Suite for Lotus and the ITF Development Center for Microsoft, are designed to ensure rapid development of Web-based collaborative and knowledge management applications built on the Domino and Exchange platforms, respectively.

The ITF Tools Suite for Lotus, available now, consists of seven development tools that give Notes developers a common Domino design element and code library for team building of applications.

It manages the development resource library, automates application assembly and tracks application variants in use across the enterprise. Application objects can then be pushed into an application directly or via self-extracting install executables. Updates can be accomplished centrally by using the same push technology or by generating service packs that modify deployed applications, said officials at IT Factory, of Cambridge, Mass.

The suite includes application development tools for building online forms, version control and other tasks.

Cambio Health Solutions LLC, a health care consulting company, is building a Web site with interaction capabilities using Domino. The company used many of the tools now in the Tool Suite for Lotus when it was working with IT Factory consultants to build the site, said John Kasvuba, marketing specialist at Cambio, who worked on the Web site.

"Their architecture allows you to do more than standard Domino," said Kasvuba, in Brentwood, Tenn. "You can organize the structure of the site in a clean and efficient manner and tag different material for different viewers, almost like a portal."

Separately, the ITF Development Center for Microsoft will be available in public beta later this month and generally available by late next month. Its used to build applications on Microsofts Web Storage System, or WSS—the foundational technology for Microsofts Exchange 2000 Server and SharePoint Portal Server.

Using the Microsoft VisualDev or Simple Object Access Protocol interface, developers can construct and manage object-oriented WSS applications. The ITF software handles all the background mapping and linking to the WSS.