A small announcement that may have some real impact on Lotus users is ePass. ePass will be Lotus' on-line, Web-based ordering system that will be the preferred mechanism for supporting sales to small and medium organizations. No mention was made of what impact this will have on the existing Lotus sales force, or what implications it will have for large-scale customers going forward.

Finally, for the second time in as many days, Jeff sat on a stool and had a cozy little fire side chat with 10,000 of us about how and why he was going to be leaving Lotus. He took a moment out to introduce Al Zollar. Once again, pages were flipped on notepads, and pens were clicked to be ready. Surely Al would be given the stage to say a few pithy words. Al stood up in the audience, turned around to face the crowd, waved and sat down again. Hmm, more than one press analyst was heard to comment "What's up with that?".

Then came the demos…
Jeff handed the baton over to Mike Zisman who gave a totally unscripted speech in which he talked about some of the thinking behind Lotus, their Knowledge Management efforts, and the new MS-Outlook integration. It was Mike's contention that the more Lotus supports alternative clients, the greater their sales of Lotus Notes - no statistics or proof of that were presented for that assumption, however.

Cliff Reeves and Donna Carvalho from Lotus then took the stage and gave an extremely impressive demo that highlighted the new features of the Lotus Notes Client and the new Knowledge Management initiative, code named Raven. During the demonstration, Donna showed a prototype workspace, made possible using the new 'portal-like' capabilities of R5.

Could Figure A be your Notes desktop in the future?

FIGURE A


Wow. Could this be your Notes desktop in the future? Roll over picture for a larger image.

Using voice recognition and speech to text services with ViaVoice, Donna demonstrated locating a key individual online with SameTime and real time language translation (very impressive methinks)!

Because the demonstration they gave showed unreleased or beta products, I was told that this is one of the few events that took place during Lotusphere that is not available via Webcasts. I don't know how true that is, though, I downloaded the screenshot shown above in Figure A from the Lotus site. So much for security.

DominoPower.com Interviews at Lotusphere
With press badge in hand, DominoPower received two exclusive on- on-one interviews at Lotusphere. We'll discuss the second interview, the one about Websphere futures, in more detail next month.

The first interview was with Donna Carvalho, the Notes Product Marketing Manager. She briefed us on the Notes client strategy in the Year 2000. Lotus feels that "Notes" as a brand has very strong recognition and value in the marketplace. To capitalize on that positive perception, Lotus is creating two new brands: iNotes and Mobile Notes. iNotes is, to a degree, just a renaming of some of the existing software that we all know and love. Browser access over the Internet to Domino servers (I bet that's the "i" in iNotes, huh?) makes up the backbone of this newly named CAL (Client Access License).