Lotus will today take the wraps off of "Domino," a fine-tuned blueprint for Notes/World Wide Web integration, officials said, in a meeting with Newsbytes at PC Expo about the newly announced availability of the Lotus Components Starter Pack both electronically and in shrink-wrapped form. The first two members of the Components Starter Pack, known as "project scheduler" and "draw diagram," can now be downloaded free of charge from the Lotus home page on the Web.

As previously reported in Newsbytes, the Lotus Components Starter Kit, a product first announced at Lotusphere in January, provides a total of six "business applets" for Lotus Notes end users and application developers.

Initially available for Windows NT and Windows 95. the components are based on Microsoft's ActiveX technology. Additional members of the first set of objects include "chart," a "comment" component for "sticky notes," a file viewer, and a spreadsheet.

At this week's meeting in New York City, Peter A. Cohen, product marketing manager, told Newsbytes that the components have just completed beta testing among more than 12,000 Lotus business partners, in addition to distributors and journalists.

About 30 to 40 percent of all Lotus business partners say they will start to use Lotus Components immediately, Cohen asserted.

Also at PC Expo, Lotus has introduced the new Lotus Components Product Warehouse, a product described by Peter Van De Graaf, director of product management, as a Notes Release 4 application for "tracking and managing" Lotus Components within an organization by "pushing or pulling (applets) from the server."

Cohen told Newsbytes that Lotus will distribute Lotus Components electronically as well as on a shrink-wrapped basis. The product will be offered over the Web through two electronic distributors, Stream International and Cybersource, in addition to the Lotus home page.

Lotus will provide links between its own home page and Stream and Cybersource, noted the product marketing manager. Lotus plans to add the remaining four applets to its Web distribution over the next couple of months.

Also, starting in August, Lotus will offer both the Lotus Components Starter Pack and Product Warehouse to all Lotus Passport "volume purchasers" who either already have Notes or NotesSuite seats covered by maintenance, or who purchase Notes or NotesSuite maintenance through the end of 1996.

Lotus plans to offer the components free of charge until the second half of this year, according to Cohen.

In research activities, he continued, partners and customers have expressed interest in enhancements within three areas: additional components, "more containers," and integration with other technologies. Lotus is now looking into all these areas, he added.

"Data query" and "rich text" are a couple of kinds of additional components that have been suggested to Lotus, Newsbytes was told.

Lotus is also exploring the possibility of providing Lotus Components to SmartSuite users, creating Netscape plug-ins from the ActiveX-based objects, and integrating the components with JavaSoft's new Java Beans, Cohen divulged.

Integration between Lotus Components and Java Beans would allow for cross-platform use in environments such as OS/2 and Macintosh, he pointed out.

Also during the meeting, Van De Graaf told Newsbytes that Lotus expects to release version 4.1 of its "Domino" Notes/Internet server this summer. Version 4.2, which will fulfill the Notes/Internet roadmap first made known by Lotus in December, is slated for availability this fall.

Version 4.2, he added, will allow for integration of Lotus Components into the Web environment, by "publishing (Microsoft) OCXes (object component extensions) into HTML (hypertext markup language)."

Lotus plans to unveil further details on "Domino" later today. The Lotus home page can be accessed at http://www.lotus.com on the Web.

(Jacqueline Emigh/19960618/Reader Contact: Lotus Development Corp., 617-577-8500; Press Contacts: Adam Banker, Lotus, 617- 693-0424; Laura Beck or Doreen Maciak, Lois Paul & Partners for Lotus, 617-238-5700)