After years of rumors, Lotus' Domino platform now is going to be melded with IBM's next-generation WebSphere collaboration and messaging platform. Company officials said last week that the parallel development tracks of Domino and the new Lotus Workplace, a platform for collaboration services built on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition and relational databases, will merge sometime in 2005.

While the convergence might happen fast, Lotus says migrations to Workplace will happen as part of a natural evolution of Domino and that Domino will be around for years to come. Users, however, will have to become familiar with IBM's WebSphere product family, which supports Workplace, and Java development. They also likely will have to retool portions of Domino applications to make the transition successfully.

"The important change is that now the two are on a deliberate path of convergence, the current Domino platform and the next-generation Workplace," says Ken Bisconti, vice president of Lotus Workplace products. "Sometime within the magic date of 2005, across the entire portfolio we will have reached functional parity between the current software [Domino] and the second-generation [collaborative] components."

Those components include messaging, personal calendar and address books, team spaces, instant messaging, Web conferencing and e-learning. And they fit into the company's On-Demand and identity-management strategy because users can activate components on an as-needed basis and tightly define access control per component.

Convergence is an announcement users have awaited.

"We knew it was coming eventually," says Scott Wenzel, a Notes administrator for a federal agency and creator of several unofficial Lotus Web sites. "We have been hearing this convergence story for five years, and now they are finally telling us how it will work."

Users haven't always been receptive to WebSphere-inspired changes. Two years ago, Lotus created an uproar when it pulled J2EE technology out of Domino. Users at the time said it was a message to get on WebSphere or be left behind.

Analysts say convergence could bring another rocky transition period for IBM and users, but that the strategy is on the right track.

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Despite the convergence, Bisconti says he doesn't expect the end of life for Domino anytime soon. "We will continue to invest in Domino, and it will have a long life as a rapid development environment," he says. But Bisconti also says the key area of investment will be to make Domino's collaborative features compatible with more-modern architectures.

"We are evolving to a service-oriented platform," he says.

That means a set of collaboration components that run on a J2EE platform and can be accessed through a portal, which is the foundation of Lotus Workplace.

Bisconti says within that strategy Domino will become a component of Workplace. It won't be rewritten on J2EE, but rather Domino applications and functions eventually will be available through the portal to various clients.