Lotus delays Raven launch - again

Lotus has once again pushed back the launch of its new knowledge management suite, code-named Raven.

The suite - which will be called Discovery Server once it goes on sale - was initially scheduled for release last summer. Lotus then canned that date, and rescheduled a launch for this week. But now the same 'taxonomy' problems that have plagued the product all along have caused Lotus to delay the launch until the end of April. Discovery Server collates all documents created within companies according to content and according to author. The taxonomy or indexing engine continually updates the values it attributes to a particular document or a particular 'expert' according to how information is used, or which experts are contacted and by whom. This categorisation means that an employee can quickly access relevant documents or be introduced to other people with an interest in the subject. The product relies on a high degree of human interactivity - but this sort of interactivity cannot be easily simulated in the lab. As customers begin to test the product, they find issues that hadn't cropped up in Lotus' tests. The result: Raven is back in the labs for some "algorithmic tuning" before it gets shipped in its final version to customers at the end of April. Jim Moffat, marketing manger at Lotus, said: "The real value of Discovery Server is getting people together. This differentiates Lotus from any other product that is on the market."