Lotus Components for the Internet, a set of cross-platform applets, are due out next year
London (November 18, 1996) — Lotus Development Corp. has revealed plans for a new range of interactive Web-based business applications based on the Java language.
Lotus and its parent company, IBM Corp., assigned a group of 300 to 400 development engineers to one of the world’s largest Java-based development efforts, Lotus President Jeff Papows said. The fruit of this program, due to appear some time next year, will be a set of cross-platform applets called Lotus Components for the Internet, which users will be able to access from a Notes client or an Internet browser.
“Components are the missing link that let you live in the Net-centric world,” Papows said.
The program is an extension of Lotus Components, released in August, and is an element of a two-part strategy that lets users access the Internet either from their SmartSuite applications or from a Web browser. To provide access to the conventional user, Lotus here launched SmartSuite 97, an update of its suite of business productivity tools. SmartSuite 97 makes it easier to incorporate information taken from the Internet, and also to publish corporate documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and calendars on a corporate Web site.
Papows declined to give full details of Lotus Components for the Internet, saying that more information will be available in January at the Lotusphere conferences in Orlando, FL, and Nice, France. But he said the components will offer a new range of interactive Web applications, not just building blocks for others to put together. Mobile users will also be able to work with the components offline, and then post the results later to Lotus’s Domino server.
Demonstrating how the system will work, Lotus gave an example of a brokerage business that lets investors access its Web site to analyze stock portfolios. With the portfolio information presented in a Lotus spreadsheet component, investors can do “what if” analyses, view the results in a Lotus chart component, and then send any changes back to their brokers.
Papows also revealed that Lotus has produced specifications for SmartSuite 97, which will include more content and will have more task-specific features.
He also said that SmartSuite has improved its market share from a 1994 lowpoint of 9 percent of unit shipments in the suite market, to 27 percent market share in the second and third quarters of 1996. SmartSuite 97 beats Microsoft Office on functionality, Papows said, describing the Microsoft product as “poor man’s team computing.” At US9 for those customers upgrading from SmartSuite 96 or from Corel Corp.’s Corel Office, he said the new product will also be attractively priced. SmartSuite 97 will begin shipping in January.
