By JOHN FONTANA

Orlando, Fla. -- Using a theme of climbing mountains at its annual Lotusphere conference, IBM's Lotus Development Corp. today revealed the peaks it hopes to scale in 1998 on the back of its collaboration and development expertise.

In unveiling version 5.0 of the Lotus Notes client, Domino server and Domino Designer, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company laid out a framework for a knowledge management platform based on a single integrated client and a scaleable and robust server architecture. The design env ironment adds numerous graphical enhancements for drag and drop development.

"We plan to be aggressive and visible in '98," said Lotus president Jeff Papows. "Dennis Leary (the brash talking TV pitchman) was only the beginning." Papows said Lotus will continue to leverage the financial power and personnel of IBM and encouraged competitors to "do themselves a favor and get the hell out of the way."

Lotus, which said it now has 20 million installed seats after adding four million last quarter, is making big changes to it client strategy . Notes 5.0 client will present a single integrated client combining functionality from cc:Mail, Lotus Mail, Weblicator and Organizer. It features Web-like navigation in back, forward, search and go buttons, news group integration and native HTML authoring. A Headline Page gives users a customized look at their most import applications and resources. For mail, users will have sorting and filtering rules.

"We recognize it's a big change, but we h ave adopted industry standards and given users the tools to make the changes," said Eileen Rudden, senior vice president of Lotus Communications Products Division. "Plus, we're responding to customer demand."

While those are real features, Lotus built them around the concept of knowledge management, a central repository for intellectual property.

"They showed an architecture," said David Marshak, vice president and senior consultant for the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston. "But they're not there yet."

IT managers seemed well aware of the conceptual stage of the announcements, but are happy with the direction.

"Capturing and storing the data is easy, it's the retrieval that's complex," said Jon Stuart, principal of Quest Consulting Group in Cambridge, Mass. "What they need to develop is a context-based search as opposed to a content search." But he said he feels very good about the strategy.

On the server side, Domino 5.0 will focus on scalability, reliability and manageability, including support fo r one million entries in the Notes Name and Address Book. The inclusion of online backup and recovery drew loud applause from the audience.

Other features focus on messaging with both Domino and Domino Mail 5.0 representing the final convergence with cc:Mail features. Both feature support for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol v3 and S/MIME. The server also supports JavaScript, HTML 4.0, Dynamic HTML and XML.

Domino Designer 5.0 is now a separate environment from the Notes client. The integrated environment is geared toward Web developers, who can use a new outline feature to build Web pages. The Designer also has an integrated view of forms, pages, framesets and scripts, and supports JavaScript and HTML 4.0. HTML also can be stored natively.

Lotus also touted its eSuite package of Java productivity applets. Its Workplace desktop is slated to ship next month for the IBM Workstation 1000. It is priced at $49 per user. The ESuite DevPack, a set of Java Beans for building interactive Web-based app lications, is priced at $1,495 per user. Preview code is available now on the company's Web site and is expected to ship in March.

Some say the DevPack is key.

"Success will depend on the development community adopting the DevPack," said Bruce Smith, an analyst with Merrill Lynch in New York.

The message seemed to give the Notes faithful the sense that Lotus is pointing them in the right direction.

"Our question is how do we use our existing infrastructure and internal applications and meld it with the intranet and Internet," said Steven Sheinheit, senior vice president of corporate systems and architecture for The Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. "eSuite, the new client and the integration with Internet standards will allow that to evolve."