Some background
LEI is the latest release of NotesPump. Lotus essentially decided to rename the product to Lotus Enterprise Integrator beginning with Release 3.0. That being said, there were a few issues with NotesPump that have been addressed with this recent release. NotesPump 2.5 offered the same core functionality that the forthcoming LEI will, including:

• The ability to transfer and synchronize a large volume of data between different database systems, on an event driven or scheduled basis, via a central Administration database, with or without programming;

• Live declarative access (i.e., RealTime Notes activities);

• LotusScript support via a set of NotesPump classes;

• A Java class library;

• Event monitoring;

• Support for the following platforms: OS/2, Windows NT, AS/400, HP-UX, Sun Solaris and IBM AIX servers.

NotesPump 2.5 had several performance limitations, primarily with multi-threaded processing of NotesPump activities. Furthermore, it did not provide support for native connectivity to ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems such as those from JD Edwards, Peoplesoft or Oracle Financials.

LEI adds a number of new capabilities.

Better platform support
LEI supports three additional operating system platforms: Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT Alpha. Lotus also has announced the product will include support for OS/390 in a future release.

Improved server architecture
LEI's server architecture has improved with better support of multi-threaded processing. This should yield a performance increase for those previously encountering performance issues with the NotesPump server.

In addition, the LEI server can run either as an add-in task under an existing Domino Server or separately, depending on your organization's requirements.

A prettier "face"
One of the complaints heard on several occasions from NotesPump 2.5 administrators and developers was "Boy, this is one ugly UI". LEI 3.0 has a revamped user interface, particularly in the LEI Administrator, which you can examine in Figure A.