Lotusphere 98, held in Florida last week, was somewhat over shadowed by the DEC-Compaq merger. At the event, Lotus Development Corp and its parent IBM Corp announced the availability of Lotus Domino for the AS/400 (CI No 3,228), the native implementation of Domino on OS/400 for the 64-bit PowerPC RISC chip. The port supports Domino Advanced Services, so that multiple Domino servers can be clustered together on one physical system for continuous availability and load balancing. It enables direct access to the DB2/400 database and supports LotusPump data distribution server. Prices go from $1,495 for a uniprocessor, $3,495 for up to four processors, and $16,250 for five or more processors. It is generally available on February 27th. Meantime, Lotus announced that the new Notes Release 5.0 client, code-named Maui, will be available in the second half of 1998, with a beta version due out in the second quarter. The Notes 5 client will include internet email, calendaring and scheduling, personal document management, news groups, browsing and native HTML authoring into a integrated internet client able to access any standard internet server, as well as Domino 5.0 servers. Although it has its own browsing capability, it will also support Navigator and Explorer for browsing. Lotus also announced version 5.0 of Domino Designer, its re-designed web development tool. Designer 5.0 has an upgraded integrated development environment, support for Javascript and HTML 4.0, and has had some key Domino design elements transformed into Java applets. There is also a Domino Java Development Kit. Lotus says it saw a unit growth of 227% for Domino products. It expects that level of growth to continue on into next year.
