Edward Brill, senior manager of messaging and collaboration at Lotus Software, said cost of ownership had become a big issue for businesses with their IT budgets under pressure.
"This [upgrading to a new version of a product] costs companies with 10s of 1000s of users a lot of money," he said.
Brill said that because Notes 5, released in 1999, had an interface which had been modernised from previous versions, IT departments had had the task of retraining users, even though they had used previous versions.
To avoid this problem with the yet-to-be-released version 6, Lotus kept the interface very similar, instead focussing on adding functionality, such as improvements to the calendaring and scheduling capabilities. Policy-based management controls which allow IT departments to enforce consistent policies across groups of users have been added as well, Brill said.
Lotus has also added functions designed to make it easier for IT departments to upgrade their users. Brill said, in particular, it had looked at the deployment of the upgrade to laptops which were never in the office. So on the new version functionality has been added to allow an IT department to install the software on its centralised server, and set it up to upgrade automatically when a user logs onto the network remotely.
Notes 6 and Domino 6 were three years in development, with the software vendor releasing 1 beta code in February. There is another major version of Notes and Domino scheduled for release in 2004, Brill said.
Pricing is yet to be announced, but Brill anticipates this will be released 60 days from the shipping date.
Vivienne Fisher travelled to DeveloperWorks Live in San Francisco as a guest of IBM
