As customers convene next week at Lotus' annual Lotusphere conference, officials at the IBM subsidiary will try to convince IT managers of the benefits of R5. Though it was released last April with more Web-based features, only a handful of organizations have upgraded. Lotus would only say the number is less than 25 percent of its installed base, which is expected to have surpassed 50 million end-user licenses.
Analysts believe the number of upgrades is far less.
However, the strengths of R5 have most customers eager to learn more about how they can implement it. Analysts and users agree that the advantages of R5 are not in the new GUI Notes clients or its end-user features, but in benefits for IT managers and developers, as well as lower operating costs. One Fortune 500 manufacturing company plans to move to R5 this year, but is waiting to formulate a concrete migration strategy. His company plans to move to R5, but will do so cautiously, migrating only on the server side this year and holding off on changing over to the R5 client. Converting 160 Domino servers plus other infrastructure devices will be enough of a task without having to worry about all 10,000 desktops plus end-user training for the new Notes interface.