In any case, here are the products.

Workplace Messaging
This is the 1.1 version of the product that was talked about last Lotusphere as NextGen mail. It's moved on from just mail in the original release to have calendaring too -- but not yet as rich as the calendaring in Notes. It has in-built presence awareness, from the next Workplace component if you use the portal functionality as your client. It also supports POP3, so you can use an existing POP3 client -- such as a Notes client, if you like.

Workplace Team Collaboration
In Notes terms, think of this as a Sametime-enabled Teamroom, or as a meld of Sametime and QuickPlace together. It's the core client functionality for chat, webcast meetings -- it does not have shared applications, yet -- and team documents and discussions.

Workplace Collaborative Learning
Workplace Collaborative Learning is the e-leaning piece. This is the one place where your company has to do more than just deploy it. You need to add course content, and maybe develop that content yourselves. You need to make sure that you fit this piece, or rather the content you put into it, into your employee development process. It's not very valuable by itself, out of the box. It's what you build that will have value.

Workplace Web Content Management
This is the Aptrix product set that Lotus bought earlier this year, and unlike the other three products, also has a Domino version. It (Lotus quote) "Enables all users to create portlets that personalise information without programming resources, so content is rapidly channeled into the portlet without the need for specialised skills... relieves IT and webmaster bottlenecks by placing end-to-end Web content management in the hands of content experts for... updates that happen in minutes, not days." So now you know.

And what about Notes and Domino?
The message on the future of Notes and Domino are now much clearer that they were last Lotusphere -- see our report at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200302/lotusphere001.html. This time they were speaking about things that we should expect to happen in Notes 8.0, and that's with 6.5 only a month and a half old, and Notes 7 towards the end of next year.

The message, coming over strongly, is that Notes is alive and well, and will remain so. Indeed, in a conversation I had with Ambuj Goyal, Lotus's General Manager, I got the strong feeling that he sees the Notes client as a more important part of the family that has been the case for couple of years, one that Lotus will be putting more emphasis on, because it is a key differentiator. The Domino server is, well, plumbing, but the Notes client is the thing that end users actually work with, and which delivers so much more value; value that comes from the applications that it delivers.

Lotus are ensuring that the new products -- the NextGen line, work with the old. One example of that is the IM -- Sametime -- implementation in Notes 6.5. You don't need a Sametime client any more, but if you do have one, it and the Notes IM component work together -- for example they share buddy lists. I like the fact that the Notes IM piece actually implements Locations for Sametime, much like I asked for at last year's Lotusphere. See my comments at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200302/notable002.html.