Nummbers

Lotus Development Corp. watchers should not expect any gifts from the company this Christmas. Contrary to previously announced plans, the groupware vendor confirmed Monday that Notes/Domino 5.0 will not ship this year.

"We're not terribly concerned about the slip of a few days," said Ken Bisconti, director, Communications Product Marketing. Lotus officials would not clarify when to expect R5, but said it would be available sometime after the New Year and before Lotusphere.

Lotus is expected to formally launch R5 at Lotusphere '99, its annual conference held in Orlando, Fla. starting Jan. 17.

"We're in the traditional death march period, which is really a period of long development hours, seven days a week," said Bisconti.

Lotus released the second public beta for Notes/Domino and Designer 5.0 Nov. 15. At that time, many observers speculated that user interface design problems were causing development delays. Bisconti said over 70,000 copies have been downloaded from Lotus' Web site.