Lotus blossoms using its IBM links

There is no telling who is going to make a success of a marriage. When Lotus wed IBM in 1995 it looked like a case of a woman past her prime settling for a rich and powerful old man. Time had put paid to Lotus' young and trendy image. Its products were being crushed by the Microsoft Office juggernaut, and even the popular cc:Mail was looking dated.

Lotus' flagship Notes, a co-operative working environment based around data stores and messaging, had 2.2 million users, and there was nothing else quite like it. But it was beginning to look like a loser, as the world moved to web protocols. And it retained a snag of the first release back in 1989: Notes was one environment sitting on top of another. The case is still the same today, as Windows uses one file system and Notes uses another - and this can be confusing even for power users.

Yet Notes now has 56 million users, according to Lotus' departing president Jeff Papows. Even allowing for some massaging of statistics, that's a huge figure for a product that has racked up almost no sales outside the corporate market.

One reason for the success is that Lotus managed to adjust to the web. Its Domino server, released in 1996, was designed to open Notes to browsers and matured last year with the much-delayed Release 5.0. Also, the match with IBM turned out to be well-nigh perfect. IBM had more corporate customers than anyone in the world and, having lost the OS market to Microsoft, it needed software to sell to them. It knew what customers wanted and told Lotus, and sales soared.

You can do everything with Microsoft software that Notes does. But as analyst Clive Longbottom, of Strategy Partners, points out, you have to pull a lot of bits and pieces together. "With Domino, you get all that functionality straight out of the box. It just works."

It has to be said that the Notes environment does not always work better: Microsoft knows a thing or two about usability, for a start.

But like everyone else in the business, Lotus sees a horizon beyond Windows. It has wedded Domino to IBM's WebSphere for transaction processing to create an ecommerce system. This year it will roll out a set of plug-ins called iNotes, which give browsers some of the functions of the full-blown Notes R5 client. These features include database replication, allowing data to be synchronised with notebooks.

Coming out in parallel is another feature set called Mobile Notes, that gives WAP phones browser access to Notes data and uses XML to provide further Notes functionality to handhelds - the first supported being the market-leading PalmPilot.

Lotus began last year to tout a couple of new buzzwords - Knowledge Management (inevitably shortened to KM), which it has finally unveiled as a technology codenamed Raven. KM sees the assets of an organisation in terms of the total of its knowledge and skills, and its efficiency in terms of how well it uses them. Central to this style of management is the idea that the most potent savvy is in people's heads.

Raven is, at its simplest level, a front-end to a variety of information sources that you can set up yourself. It also maps "affinities" within an organisation, flagging the skills and knowledge of members. And it provides ways in which assets can be marshalled and used; these include a virtual meeting place called Quickplace.

Critics say KM is no more than a set of old ideas wrapped up in new jargon to sell more software. But it got a lot of positive reaction at Lotusphere.

Raven raises some thorny issues, as Lotus is first to admit. A head of department who knows how to fix the copier is not going to relish a flood of Raven-inspired support calls. So people have to be given the choice of having their skills itemised or called upon. There is also the question of whether a company owns all an employee's skills: should someone hired as a singer also be expected to dance?

And Ovum analyst Eric Woods points out that Raven could cause havoc by "opening up a new metric which shows where the real expertise lies" - and this may not correspond to an organisation's existing heirarchy.

But Scott Smith, managing principal within IBM Global Services, said: "Think of the cultural change if you really start to reward people on the basis of their expertise."

See also:

Lotus gives date for Raven beta tests

Lotus claims its delayed knowledge management software, Raven, will finally go into beta testing after the Lotusphere conference in Berlin in a fortnight.  14 Sep 2000

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