Notes and Domino will also be shipped in a different way in the future. Feature releases will be separate from maintenance. The expectation is a feature release once a year, unlike the current release every two or three years. Maintenance will be in the form of fixpacks, which customers selectively apply to solve specific problems. Fixpacks won't contain any new features and can be applied as required by customers to possibly more than one Notes or Domino release, rather than having to do a complete upgrade to the next Maintenance Upgrade, as has to be done now. Fixpacks will be more likely to appear as required, rather than on a schedule. It's not clear yet exactly when this move will happen, but we are expecting ND6.5 this year and ND7 next, so we may already be close to being on the yearly release path.

NextGen
The idea behind NextGen is this. Lotus and IBM are taking the knowledge and experience that they have built up in developing collaboration software--the stuff that's been implemented in Notes and Domino, Sametime, Quickplace, and the other Lotus products--and they are putting that knowledge and experience to work in the larger, different J2EE world. They are then aiming the resulting products largely at a different audience than that for the NowGen products, an audience they say doesn't yet have access to collaborative applications.

The buzzwords to go with this are the enablement of contextual collaboration, where collaborative functionality is natively included in the J2EE applications to give the user a seamless experience. Your customer service can collaborate with your customers via your Web-based store, using Lotus collaboration technology, from your WebSphere/NextGen application.

They've also clarified where NextGen messaging fits with Notes and Domino. As they say, it's all standards based. What it will be is a server mail router and mail storage technology, and because it's built on WebSphere, it will be massively scalable. It won't have its own directory or directory management subsystem. It will rely instead on LDAP to get directory information. If the enterprise already had Domino, it could be that Domino directory. If Domino directories are used, NextGen Mail users can be registered via Domino, and the registration will make directory entry settings to suit.

NextGen mail will not have its own clients, but it will support HTTP (restricted to IE5.5 and above, in the first release) and POP3 clients, with IMAP to follow. It will use SMTP to connect to other mail systems. MIME & HTML is used to manage rich text, and the intention is full fidelity interoperability of rich text with ND6. It's aimed at the people who may not have any email access at the moment, such as factory floor employees and others with low email needs, but with whom communication is important.

The initial release--in beta right now--will be low function, but because the architecture is componentized, adding new functions will be simple and easy, according to Heidi Votaw of Lotus Product Management. Indeed, Lotus plans to ship at least one upgrade of new functionality in 2003, after the initial release, and more in 2004. Calendaring will at some point be added via iCAL, and this will interoperate with ND6. Actually, ND6 already uses iCAL, but only between SMTP-connected D6 servers. What won't happen is feature parity between the Notes client and NextGen mail, partly to protect the Notes client, I guess, and partly because without having its own client, parity is just too hard to do. It will be cheaper than Notes, but at the moment pricing and licensing-along with the product name--has yet to been finalized.