Customers are expecting IBM/Lotus to finally present a clear picture for the future of Notes/Domino and its integration with the next-generation Workplace environment built on WebSphere when the company convenes its annual Lotusphere conference this week.

IBM/Lotus is taking a page out of rival Microsoft's playbook by focusing much of its conference on developers in the hope that the legions of Notes developers can help smooth the integration between the traditional Notes/ Domino platform and the next-generation Java-based Workplace environment.

That transition has been anything but smooth thus far. For the past few years, the Lotus faithful have felt that IBM was pushing Workplace and WebSphere and ignoring Notes/Domino even though the company said that was not the case.

"Last year, I walked away from the general session and I was like 'yeah . . . so?'" says Bruce Elgort, manager of information services for Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas. "I just think this is the year we all walk away and we totally understand where they are going and how we [the users] can go there." He says it is clear to him from information leading up to Lotusphere that Notes is not dead; "It is alive and well."

Sales job ahead

That attitude is what IBM/Lotus needs to foster.

"Right now the battle for Lotus is to hold onto its installed base and get them excited about the Workplace generation," says Matt Cain, an analyst with Meta Group. "One of the Holy Grails of the whole transition is for IBM to deploy a development tool that has the ease of use and rapid application development of Domino Designer but on the Java platform."

The goal is part of a larger strategy to launch a strike against Microsoft, pitting IBM's Java-based development tools and WebSphere against Microsoft's Visual Studio and .Net Framework. The battle is for the hearts of developers building applications for full-feature clients such as IBM's Workplace Client Technology and Microsoft's Office.

IBM's newest weapon, the Workplace Designer, will be unveiled at Lotusphere. Workplace Designer is a tool aimed at those familiar with Domino Designer's rapid application development environment. Workplace Designer will incorporate many of the same form and scripting features of the Domino Designer. This will let users build applications based on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) that run on Lotus Workplace on the WebSphere platform.