This marks the final stage in Lotus Software's beta testing program for this product. The idea of the beta program is to allow Lotus customers like you to get your two-cents in during the development cycle, influencing product design and helping to ensure the final product will address customer needs. The final version of Lotus Notes and Domino 6 will incorporate the result of feedback and testing from the over 100,000 customers who have downloaded beta code.

According to Scott Cooper, vice president, Lotus Solutions, IBM Software Group, since this public pre-release is now available for download, the company is "…on the fast track to a successful Q3 release of the final product."

The Lotus Domino server pre-release beta is available for Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000, IBM OS/400, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris/SPARC, and Linux (IA-32) server platforms. The Lotus Notes client pre-release beta is available for Windows 32-bit operating systems and Macintosh clients, including Mac OS X.

There are a number of new upgrades and capabilities in Lotus Notes and Domino 6, including server management and monitoring tools, increased security and support for security standards, higher performance, and tighter alignment with IBM software technologies from WebSphere, DB2, and Tivoli.

Says Cooper, "Notes/Domino 6 is designed to meet the e-business needs of customers thanks to improved administration, application development, and end-user capabilities."

If you've been following the press on Lotus Notes and Domino 6, however, you may recall that at Lotusphere the company announced that it was removing its JSP (Java Server Pages) engine, known as Garnet, from the finished version of Domino 6. The beta release is without JSP support as well, even though it had been in the first four betas.

Interestingly, a group of independent Notes developers in the Notes Open Source Software Organization (NotesOSS, pronounced Notes Sauce) have decided to try to come up with an open-source replacement for JSP.

A few hours after the original announcement of the removal of Garnet, Jurgen Van de Moere of Eurodaq, one of the most prolific beta testers of Garnet on Notes.Net asked NotesOSS to support the open source effort to replace the feature set. So far Jurgen has produced the first step in NSF-deployable JSPs: detailed instructions for integrating JSP engines with existing Domino 6 servers.