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ArticlesUsers Like SmartSuite's Team Computing


March 1996 / News & Views / Users Like SmartSuite's Team Computing
Dave Andrews

Although Microsoft's 32-bit version of Office was the first integrated business suite to ship for Windows 95, Lotus's SmartSuite 96 , which is now available, leapfrogs the competition with impressive team-computing capabilities. BYTE interviewed seven beta testers of Lotus's new suite to find out what their favorite features were. We also learned what users would like to see in future versions of SmartSuite.

In general, users liked the suite's workgroup-collaboration features. They were also looking forward to using the new BASIC-like Lotus Script programming language, but most hadn't fully evaluated that yet. Users were disappointe d in the lack of full 32-bit versions of 1-2-3 and Organizer. What foll ows is a detailed list of what they liked.

1. Team-review capabilities. Users like team-computing features that allow you to share documents and gather comments in an automated process. For example, in Word Pro, you can assign editing rights for specific people, as well as markup options for each reviewer. When you get back all the different edits and consolidate them into one file, you can quickly see who made which edit.

2. Tight integration of 1-2-3 with Lotus Notes. Most of the SmartSuite beta testers use Notes, including some users who were evaluating the beta version of Notes 4.0, which was slated to ship in January. Users mentioned they like other applications' (e.g., the Approach database) tight links to Notes, but 1-2-3 was mentioned the most. For example, one company that raises investment funds uses 1-2-3 as a front end to a Notes database. Data is first entered in 1-2-3, where employees can do instant what-if analysis and then route the da ta throughout the company in Notes.

3. Tight integration of Approach with Lotus Notes. This integration enables Approach users to generate mailing labels and reports that are based on Notes data, among other things.

4. Remote presentations using Team Show in Freelance. Many users commented that it's getting harder to gather many people at one time for a group presentation. Freelance allows you to give a presentation to other users over a network. It also allows you to save a presentation as a self-running presentation, send it over E-mail, and then let the audience members review it at their leisure.

5. Tight integration with E-mail. You can access E-mail menus for engines such as cc:Mail or Notes Mail from within a SmartSuite application. You can route a message through a sequence of people using Team Mail, which provides a mechanism for basic work-flow applications without requiring Notes.

6. Tight integration among SmartSuite applic ations. For example, if you want to create a mailing label in 1-2-3, you are automatically brought into Approach.

7. Support for the Internet. Users liked the ability to open up a document in Word Pro over the Internet, as well as Freelance's ability to allow you to convert a presentation into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format for display on the World Wide Web.

8. Support for Notes F/X 2.0. Notes Field Exchange lets you send information from applications into Notes and vice versa. Notes F/X 2.0 allows users to access Notes action menus from within SmartSuite applications, providing a more seamless integration with Notes than previous versions of Notes F/X.


SmartSuite

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