Lotus to end support of 4.6 for Notes and Domino

Computerworld - LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLA. -- Lotus Development Corp. is preparing to give IT executives the ultimate incentive to move to Version R5 by ending support for the 4.6 platforms of Notes and Domino.

"The current plan is to end support in January 2002," said Ken Bisconti, the former vice president of marketing for messaging and collaboration at Lotus who last week was named vice president of the Lotus Worldwide Business Partner organization. "We normally support a release nine to 12 months after the next upgrade." The R5 code was released in March 1999. "We extended 4.6 based on Y2k," Bisconti said.

Development of the 4.6 code base has stopped with Version 4.6.7g, according to Ed Brill, senior product marketing manager for Notes clients. "We are only doing Y2k fixes, and those run out in two weeks."

At the Lotusphere users conference, the company indicated that just over half of its customers have moved to R5. That still leaves a sizable number who will have to make the switch in the next 11 months. While some users are already in the planning stages, many are also wrestling with upgrades to Windows 2000.

The combination is likely to be an expensive and time-consuming task.

"The combination means that 2002 is coming like a freight train," said Jon Barton, an executive consultant at Xerox Connect Inc. in Alpharetta, Ga. "I think some customers will be strapped with two major upgrades."

But Barton said Lotus must strike a balance between wearing out customers with upgrades and keeping products competitive. The next version of Notes and Domino, known as Rnext, is likely to be delivered sometime in 2002.

"We've been anticipating this cut off and we have been testing R5," said Michelle Monaghan, a Notes system administrator at AllTell Information Services, a telecommunications company in Little Rock, Ark. She plans to begin rolling out 4,000 seats of R5 before the end of the month.

But for those who haven't been planning and have stayed on 4.6, which is known as a stable code base, the comfort zone is shrinking fast.

"We work with lots of big companies that are on 4.6 and I can't see them getting moved in a year's time," said Andrew Pine, network engineer at consulting firm BitbyBit in New York. "Our large customers will have an urgency if January 2002 is the cutoff date."

Pine said his customers are staying away from their 4.6 platforms for now because they are stable and are instead upgrading their troublesome Windows 95 and 98