Lotus announces Notes for ASPs

Lotus Development is to release an ASP version of its Notes groupware product at September's Lotusphere conference in Berlin.

This will be bundled with the existing ASP Solutions Pack that currently includes the Domino server, WebMail, WebSphere, QuickPlace and SameTime. Making Notes available through ASPs will mean small and medium enterprises (SMEs) will be able to afford to use it. Tony Coxs, knowledge management manager at Lotus, said: "It's a natural extension to what we're doing at the moment. Currently you can set up a Domino application and sell it to customers, but now we're making it very much more of a no-brainer for them to do it." Ashim Powell, analyst at Meta Group, said Lotus has been targeting the hosted applications market for four or five years, having been one of the first vendors to identify the possibilities of offering collaborative applications and mail as a hosted offering.