Dave Andrews
New products and services that link Lotus Notes to the Internet are expanding the uses of Lotus's groupware platform. When coupled with Notes' built-in security, these products let Notes perform double duty as a groupware platform and an Internet publishing tool.
Companies typically use Lotus Notes to share confidential electronic communication such as product strategy with business partners and customers. Notes' tight security has eased privacy concerns of companies who outsource their Notes management to international Notes networks, such as WorldCom, from Houston, TX-based Wolf Communications ((713) 650-6522) or AT&T's ((800) 204-2764) Network Notes. "Notes has a stronger security model than the Internet," says Todd Ostrander, extended enterprise product manager at Egghead Software (Issaquah, WA),
which is beta testing the AT&T Network Notes slated for commercial rollout in June. That desire for confidentiality can relegate the Internet--where practically anyone with a Web browser can retrieve data--to public information dissemination tasks. That's starting to change, however.
Notes add-on products like InterNotes from Lotus Development (Cambridge, MA, (617) 577-8500) and Tile from the Walter Shelby Group (Bethesda, MD, (301) 718-7840; info@shelby.com) can already convert designated Notes databases to a WWW page. The next step is to populate Notes databases from the Web, which is what a future version of InterNotes and the Walter Shelby Group's Tgate module in Tile do. Expected to ship in June, Tgate takes information that someone filled out in an HTML form (e.g., a purchase order) and converts it into data that adds a new document to a Notes database.
Tgate's appeal is that unlike the classic Notes collaboration method, in which users have a Notes client, anyone with a Web browser could
add to a Notes database. If deployed on a WWW server with support for encrypted communications, Tgate can be used for secure transactions.
Tile does not provide a full Notes client. For example, it can't update or delete existing Notes documents. But products like InterNotes and Tgate increase the potential number of users that can interact with your company's Notes data and network. Says John Buckman, president of Walter Shelby, "You can't ask all of your potential customers to buy Notes so they can look at your advertising."
Notes Meets the Internet
