Lotus Platforms Adopt Java 2

Lotus will adopt the Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.3 platform in future releases of its platforms, Lotus chief Al Zollar said today during his keynote address at the Lotusphere 2002 users conference in Orlando, Fla.

The general manager of IBMs Lotus Software division announced that said J2EE support would take Lotus to the "next level of collaboration," allowing customers to standardize on available platforms and thus have better interoperability among applications.

"Lotus has been promoting collaboration for 10 or 15 years and its gratifying to see how the importance of collaboration has moved to center stage," said Zollar. "Judging by what our customers tell me, were delivering on our promise and were moving on to an even more rewarding phase we call unleashing collaboration."

J2EE 1.3 support is expected to begin in some areas of the forthcoming Lotus Notes and Domino 6, formerly code-named Rnext. Lotus Notes and Domino 6 are the official names of the next generation of software from Lotus, succeeding the current R5.

The final beta of Rnext was announced at the show and is due for release within 30 days. The general availability release of Lotus Notes and Domino 6 is expected this summer.

New features in this beta include mobility enhancements for roaming user and multi-user support, more control over replication, and improved wireless access via PDAs, pagers and Web-enabled mobile phones. There are also interface enhancements to the mailbox, calendar, welcome page and bookmarks.

New application development capabilities include: support for design element locking and reuse and sharing of personal agents; built-in support for connecting to external data, which was previously available through a separate appli-cation, Domino Enterprise Connections Services; and support for Web development features, including Java Server Pages (JSP), a JSP tag library for Lotus Domino objects and Java servlets.

There are also the standard improvements in performance, availability, reliability, administration and security man-agement as well as tighter integration with other IBM technologies such as DB2, WebSphere and Tivoli.

As part of furthering that integration, IBM also announced a new services strategy for Lotus at the show, known as IBM Software Services for Lotus.

It will call for Lotus Services salespeople to work closely with IBM Software Group sales teams and IBM business partners to deliver total solutions of IBM and Lotus products to customers and increase customer adoption of those prod-ucts.

Teams will also provide consulting services to assist clients in technology deployment, infrastructure assessments, knowledge sharing and total cost of ownership measurement, as well as customer education and training.

In other news during the shows first day, IBM announced agreements with Cisco Systems, Inc. and Captaris, Inc. to develop an IBM Lotus Domino version compatible with those companies unified communications solutions, targeting enterprise and mid-market companies, respectively.

The new offerings aim to enhance end-user productivity by providing a unified interface to voice and e-mail mes-saging clients, regardless of the client deployment strategy, IBM officials said.

IBM also announced plans to offer a hosted version of its Lotus Sametime instant messaging and e-meeting server through IBM Global Services, as well as the inclusion of the Tivoli server health management and planning toolset within the Lotus Domino Administrator in the next version of Domino.