"During the entire 5.0 beta program, there were over 165,000 downloads of the Notes software."

The information in the article comes from many sources; the sessions and materials provided to Lotusphere attendees, discussions with conference attendees, some of the Iris developers in the labs and a private briefing with DominoPower editors that was given by Blair Hankins and Annette Zawacki of Iris and Lotus respectively. During this interview, they demonstrated the latest beta (164) of the Notes client and spoke about some of the thinking behind the latest version of this make-or-break product for Lotus.

Overall impressions
This year Lotus lost some steam compared to years past. Everyone was ready for R5: the user community, the Lotus Business Partner community and the press. Many of us have been using the beta for months now and were ready to hear exactly when the product would ship. During the Business Partner briefings on Sunday, Jeff Papows solicited the support of the partner community for when he'd announce the delayed ship date during the next day's opening general sessions. The company seemed unapologetic about the delay but they were focusing on the right thing: getting a complete, functional, debugged product out the door to manufacturing.

That is (of course) the correct attitude -- but how many years has R4 been shipping now? It's my personal opinion that Lotus has a pretty small window (time wise) of opportunity for R5. Y2K is no longer in the future;, its projects and increasingly restrictive budgets are here now. Windows2000 won't be delayed forever. If Lotus/IBM are going to stay in what almost everyone acknowledges is a"'two horse race" with Microsoft, then R5 needs to ship and it needs to ship very, very soon to keep from losing market share to Exchange.

Technical stuff
The number of product announcements this year at Lotusphere were truly impressive. In addition to the R5 hooplah, Lotus introduced Sametime, new versions of Domino.Doc, and more. Even with all of the focus on Release 5, Lotus has obviously been busy in all of its development areas.

The most impressive, from a development standpoint, had to be Sametime, Lotus' new network-based, real-time communication and collaboration technology. With this new technology, any competent Lotuscript developer can build applications that offer new levels of groupware functionality. Available in versions that do or don't require Notes, this product is already receiving very good reviews from the computer media. At one of the breakout sessions, integrating Sametime into a Notes application was demonstrated. Install the Sametime LSX (LotuScript eXtension), add three or four lines of script to your existing application and you're up and running. Truly impressive.