Network World: New Lotus boss sailing tricky seas

Saw Network World's John Fontana just outsidethe Lotus office in Cambridge last week...knew that something good wascoming up.  And here it is...IBM/Lotus chief MichaelRhodin this week will quietly finish his first 100 days at the helm, butit is the coming months that will tell if he is the one who can align Notes/Dominowith IBM's Java-based collaboration strategy and validate customers' continuedinvestment in the Lotus platform.   The first order of business willbe to reveal that new versions of Notes/Domino will extend past Version8, which could ship by the end of 2006. Some discussionabout the entire Workplace portfolio...Notes and Dominois not going away, which is good because we have a huge investment in that,"says Sinstead, who also has deployed to 150 users the Workplace ManagedClient, a server-managed collaboration environment that works online andoffline. While the managed client has yet tomatch the rich feature set of Notes, it lets him extend collaboration toolsto retailers, who don't have IT departments, desktop support or broadbandconnections. The Workplace Managed Client itself isn'tintended to "match" the rich feature set of Notes.  Notesis built in 7.0 to be a plug-in in the WMC environment; in future versions,more and more Notes innovations will be available using the same Eclipse-basedframework.  Notes is still Notes, and WMC doesn't replace it or offeran alternative -- since Notes also runs within WMC.Link: NetworkWorld: New Lotus boss sailing tricky seas>