Interactive Week explains how Release 5 of Lotus Notes and Domino almost became an April Fool’s joke.

PC Week has coverage of the release of Lotus Notes and Domino R5. Domino R5 server also works with existing enterprise systems and clients, including digital/cellular phones and personal digital assistants.

PC World’s Eric Bender explains why some (maybe most) Notes users hate a love/hate relationship with Lotus.

Percussion Software said that Percussion PowerFlow 4.0 is available. Percussion PowerFlow 4.0 has several new features, including an increase in PowerFlow engine performance and support for custom built agents using Java or LotusScript.

Symantec announced the release of Norton AntiVirus 2.0 for Lotus Notes/Domino. Enhanced to support the Lotus/Domino R5 multi-server environment, version 2.0 includes a new feature called Scan Window, which allows an administrator to schedule a scan for a particular period of time.

If you experienced some access difficulties with any of our publications today, it was because we were installing new servers. As some of you know, we’ve had some intermittent outages throughout the week. Given the influx of new readers and the new publication, we felt the healthiest thing to do would be to completely update our server farm. After nearly 16 hours straight work the new servers appear to be working well and we’re getting ready to go home. Because the new machines have considerably more muscle than our older work-horses, you should notice a measurable performance boost across the entire ZATZ Network.

We attempted to buy an iMac through retail outlets in Princeton, NJ today. Both CompUSA and Best Buy reported that the iMacs had been discontinued pending new Apple models and that they had no stock available nor any ETA for new stock. We did place an order with PC Connection which reported over 70 purple and 40 orange iMacs in stock (but no other colors).

Here’s the press release on the availability of R5. In the statement, Lotus mentions the Super.Human.Software Tour ’99 and how its relationship with AOL with help users of R5.

Collaborative Research, an information services company specializing in emerging e-commerce and e-business infrastructures, has conducted an independent study entitled Mail Plus: The Real Issue in Comparing Lotus Notes/Domino with Microsoft Exchange.

Lotus Development Corporation announced that Astra Pharmaceuticals has selected Lotus LearningSpace as its distributed learning platform for Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) training. Astra will develop and deploy a LearningSpace training solution from NetPerformance, the education and training division of Lotus Premium Business Partner U.S. Technologies.