Hewlett-Packard Co and Lotus Development Corp have teamed to integrate Lotus Notes and Hewlett-Packard’s OpenMail electronic messaging software, providing Notes systems management products and joint sales, consulting and support services worldwide. To seal the agreement, Hewlett-Packard will bundle Lotus Notes 3.2 with its Series 800 Unix servers from this month and resell Lotus Notes via its existing channel of value added resellers. In the first quarter of 1995, Hewlett-Packard will release OpenMail Exchange Facility for Lotus Notes. This is essentially a gateway product that will provide interoperability between Notes and OpenMail across enterprise environments, such as support for dual directory synchronisation and mail addressing. Hewlett-Packard has also committed to Lotus’s Communications Server/Notes system, which it intends to use as its standard groupware and messaging architecture. Lotus, for its part, will integrate specific features of OpenMail with the Communications Server for release as a single combined product in the future. The duo also announced NotesView, an Simple Network Management Protocol-based extension of Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView that will enable administrators to manage large Notes networks. NotesView, which comes with a graphical front end, includes tools that will enable users to monitor and check every Notes node on the network from a single machine, analyse system capacity and alert users of critical conditions. The software also comes with tools to monitor Notes replication and mail routing. NotesView is available from January. Both products are expected to go to beta test this month and they are currently in their third week of coding.
