Lotus Development Corp has announced the beta availability of the new version of its SmartSuite productivity applications. The IBM Corp-owned company says it has improved the quality of the product and added new features to enhance its marketability. Release 9 of the suite, which will be sold under the name of SmartSuite Millennium includes the company’s FastSite intranet publisher, enabling users to publish their own web sites from standard SmartSuite or Word documents. But Bill DeStefanis, director of Internet Suite marketing at Lotus, is quick to add that the company is not trying to take business away from high end web designers. The new offering, which includes IBM’s ViaVoice voice recognition technology (CI No 3,361) is being pitched at existing corporate customers, as well small office home office users, an area Lotus has not tapped before. In order to run the new SmartSuite offering, users must have systems with at least 8Mb of memory, and run Windows 95 and Windows NT. Versions for Windows 98 and NT 5.0 will be made available when they are released. The new version is now compatible with Microsoft Corp files and Lotus’s new Java E-Suite application offerings. Lotus is competing with Microsoft in this space, and claims to be number two behind the software giant. But the company has no illusions that it will be able to take the top spot and move ahead of BackOffice. Pricing on the product will remain the same as the existing version; $400 for the Suite and $150 for an upgrade. The product will be available in June.
