Program Strikes the Right Notes
With upward of 100 million personal computers in the world, can software used on a tiny minority of them seriously claim to be a major force in the future of computing?
It can if the program is Lotus Notes. When Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., introduced it in 1989, Notes sold for $62,500, which allowed up to 200 people to use it. The program nevertheless caught on among big firms, the only ones who could afford it, and today, despite a customer base of just 2,000 companies, Lotus Notes boasts 300,000 users.
Now there’s Notes 3.0, and with it a much lower entry price--$995, which will license two users plus a third machine acting as the file server. With discounts for multiple users at the same site, that translates to actual prices of $65,000 to $70,000 for 200 users, according to Chris Reed, the program’s director of market development.
Lotus Notes is best described as a document management system for people linked together on local or wide area networks. Access is also available to others who dial in from remote locations.
The documents it manages are whatever kinds of computer files people need to share, be they reports from a word processor or tables from a spreadsheet or database or video clips or digitized audio messages.
The power of Lotus Notes is its ability to reorganize the way people work together. Electronic pathways between computers need not be restricted by building floor plans or department organization charts, so traditional modes of organizing work teams are outmoded when everyone is linked together on a network.
According to James T. Kennedy, who installed the Lotus Notes network at the western region of Texaco Refining & Marketing Co. headquartered in Los Angeles, Notes works best if a company’s management allows a free flow of information. At Texaco, for instance, the latest financial results are distributed via Lotus Notes so that everyone can monitor the company’s performance.
Kennedy said important features of the new version are full-text search and retrieval of data and better forms-routing tools. It is now much easier to send an electronic form for travel authorization through the chain of command and get it back with the required “signatures,” he said.
As a companywide tool, Notes requires a lot of time and expertise to install and maintain, at least until people learn to use it. Kennedy used to devote most of his time to managing Notes, but now that the installation has matured he has been assigned other duties.
The strength of Lotus Notes is that it keeps all users up-to-date with the most current version of whatever documents are being distributed. That’s a virtually impossible task when you try to supply everyone with paper copies of the latest company policy manual, for instance.
Much in the same way that a network needs a “server,” a computer dedicated to storing the programs and files to be shared on the network, it also needs a Notes server to keep track of the document database that Notes creates and manages. But the Notes server is software, and it can run on the same computer that serves as a network server.
When there is more than one Notes Server, representing multiple networks, they communicate with each other and compare the contents of their respective document databases to make sure they are identical. When outdated files are found, they are automatically replaced with the latest versions from whichever Notes server the document originated. Even employees out in the field who call in from time to time from a laptop with a modem can get the portion of the database they need replicated.
Notes server software runs on OS/2-equipped computers. But Notes 3.0 expands on that by offering a Windows server ($495) that will manage a group of people linked on a Windows-only network.
Another enhancement is a Notes “client” program that lets someone working on a Macintosh computer make use of and contribute to the document database. Translation between Mac and PC file formats is automatic. The Macintosh has to be connected by a local area network to a Notes server running OS/2.
Versions of Notes will run on all of the major local area networking systems such as Novell Netware (NetBIOS) versions 2.2 and 3.1, Microsoft LAN Manager 2.1, Microsoft Windows for Workgroups, Apple Local Talk, IBM SNA, DECnet Pathworks and Banyan Vines. Lotus also intends to have Notes programs available later this year for computers running various forms of the UNIX operating system. These include Sun SPARC systems running SunSoft’s Solaris, IBM RISC Systems 6000 running IBM AIX, Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 series computers running HP/UX and PCs running SCO UNIX.
All that connectivity means that Lotus Notes will be available on virtually any networked computer system a business is likely to have. Where previous versions broke down barriers among workers as long as they were tied together on one kind of network, version 3.0 can tie together companies even when departments have chosen incompatible network systems.
Lotus President Jim Manzi believes that Notes is the future of his company, which has lost the dominance it once held in the spreadsheet market with its Lotus 1-2-3 program.
It may be the future of a lot of other companies too.
Computer File welcomes your comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.
