Lotus Breaks Out KM Server

Lotus Development Corp. on Tuesday announced that it would sell its Discovery Server knowledge management software as a standalone product, effective with the 1.1 release of the software.

Previously, Lotus bundled Discovery Server, which analyzes and identifies relationships between documents and people in an organization, with its K-Station portal software as part of its Knowledge Discovery System suite.

But with K-Station already separated from the suite as part of the parent company IBMs WebSphere Portal platform, which was announced earlier this month, Lotus decided to offer Discovery Server as a separate product, as well.

Customers will be able to use Discovery Server with a choice of front ends including K-Station, the WebSphere Portal or Plumtree Software Inc.s Corporate Portal and Gadget Web Services offerings. Lotus officials, in Cambridge, Mass., identified those as the three leading portal applications on the market, but said integration with other portal vendors products was planned as well.

Aside from being a standalone product for the first time, Discovery Server 1.1, which will be available on Wednesday, will include new application programming interfaces for integrating the knowledge management software with other applications, such as search and navigation tools and workflow management, officials said.

Discovery Server 1.1 is priced at $199 per user. A trial download is available at the Lotus site.