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To: U Up U Down who wrote (21719)	9/16/1999 12:35:00 PM
From: AlienTech	Respond to of 43080

INIT's moving... Lotus Joins The Community (09/14/99, 10:57 a.m. ET) By Madeleine Acey, TechWeb Lotus is set to launch its online communities management system on Wednesday with British Telecommunications, France Telecom, and online applications host Interliant as customers. InterCommunity will help telecom companies, other service providers, and large enterprises manage thousands of online communities and the user accounts of those groups, said Lotus executive vice president Michael Zisman. Zisman said the management system will build on the IBM-owned groupware specialist's Domino Instant Host package for ASPs -- creating a new phase in custom portals. As people join more communities -- for their jobs, interest groups, their kids' schools, and so on -- end users will need a portal to manage all the communities they are in, he said. "When you go to the service provider, you will see a page with all the communities you're registered for, you'll have one way of logging in for all of those," Zisman said. Portals like AOL and Yahoo want to get people to stay on their sites, he said, and communities provide "stickiness" to keep them online. This is enormously attractive to telecom providers as these users clock up a lot of phone charges, especially in Europe where local call costs are relatively high. "In Europe, the telcos are really in the lead, but they need a way of managing thousands of communities," he said. "InterCommunity provides the whole back end to host the communities and it gives the management the host needs. It's a form of directory management." Zisman said he sees a big role for such a system with large companies. IBM has been using it to manage discussion databases -- creating team rooms for projects and audit trails of those creative processes. The next step for online communities and other hosted applications will be "business process outsourcing," Zisman said. Once companies put their human resources departments' services on an intranet, what is to stop that department being totally run by an outside company, he said. "No company does their own payroll anymore," Zisman said. Pricing for InterCommunity will be by negotiation based on the number of users. InterCommunity will be available starting Wednesday. Zisman said he was not aware of any competing products. Competition will come from ISPs and major portal companies, said Neil Ellul, U.K. managing director of e-commerce community CommerceNet. He said this might require some alliances or acquisitions between companies with directory services software, such as AOL/Netscape, and companies with database expertise, such as Oracle. "Lotus has the database expertise, Microsoft should have the database expertise, too," Ellul said. "The database is how we build value from online communities." "It's got to make it easier for the people providing the content," he said of InterCommunity. techweb.com