I have already sung Note's praises where it counts. But Notes will never be your best choice for a Web-centric writing and publishing environment for your users. While Microsoft Office often plays that role by default, its defects for supporting Web publishing, let alone collaboration, are huge. Frontier and Manila occupy the significant sweet spot where collaboration, writing, and publishing meet the intranet and Internet.

With XML-RPC and SOAP, they also meet the sweet spot where data can be staged from or to them into or out of Domino and Notes. More precisely, you can do the following:

• Make Manila your standard corporate application for prototyping intranet applications at the team, workgroup, and departmental level;

• Let your users decide when or if Manila won't get them where they want to go, once in use;

• Decide whether Frontier takes them the rest of the way, and if not, complete a given application in Notes;

• Use Domino and Notes for heavy-duty infrastructure support as well as for tying the corporation's complete collaborative application set together as needed for load-balancing, security and, replication.

These are just some starting ideas. If you've got tools like Notes and Domino and Frontier and Manila, you've got a lot of options.

Get the jump on other Domino and Notes shops by exploring UserLand's implementations of XML and peer-to-peer publishing as you await their formal integration into Domino and Notes and their adoption across your environment over the next two to five years.

Russ Lipton is an independent Web consultant and can be reached at headduffer@duffer.com.