Ed Brill

More pre-Lotusphere coverage...

Customers that have already adopted Workplace will benefit from the tighter ties as well. IBM is expected to announce the Workplace Designer development tool, a product developed by many of the same software engineers who worked on the Domino Designer rapid application development tool, at the show.

Previously, development tools for Workplace were limited to Workplace Builder, a more basic tool used by nontechnical business users to create simple applications based on templates.

"They're going to show us that their new Workplace technology is getting better and more complete, but they're going to be very clear about the fact that Workplace builds on and complements the strengths of Notes and Domino, and that they're going to be committed to both for a long time to come," [RHS Consulting president Richard] Schwartz said.