Following its launch last month, myVcard.com Thursday enhanced its group calendar function to complement its contact management and address book update features. The free Web-based service enables consumers to create and manage calendars for an unlimited number of groups and events without requiring the user to log in separately for each group. In addition, all the events for all the groups a user belongs to, plus their personal events, are consolidated into a single, editable, calendar.

Computer Shopper has this article on new products that are available. The article also includes a summary of Lotus Organizer 5.0.

Fox News has this story on a small and unknown German software company that is giving away its office suite to individual users. Three weeks into the offer, which has been widely announced only in Germany, 200,000 people have downloaded Star Office 5.0. That’s a good way to gain market share.

On December 15th, DataMirror ships Transformation Server for DB2/MVS, new transformation software for distributing IBM S/390 mainframe data, and SQL Pump 3.0, a major upgrade of its Lotus Notes data integration tool. DataMirror SQL Pump 3.0 is a bi- directional replication tool that lets businesses access, transform and seamlessly synchronize data between Lotus Notes and multiple databases deployed throughout their organization.

Lotus Development Corporation and Hewlett-Packard Company announced that they will offer customers a complete, easy-to-purchase and -deploy messaging migration solution. Lotus and HP have worked together to develop a pre-tested, pre-configured solution that optimizes the strengths of Domino on the HP NetServer system, and gives partners and their customers the opportunity to streamline the migration process.

Thanks to reader Siva Ramanathan for sending in this article on IBM’s WebSphere. According to TechWeb, the 2.0 version of the WebSphere will ship by the end of this year. The standard edition will include runtime and tools improvements.

Lotus CEO Jeff Papows has this to say on the real gains of the Internet.

PC Week reports that Novell announced the release of NetWare 4.2, an upgrade for NetWare 4.11 and intraNetWare customers. Is it really needed as NetWare 5.0 ships?

Ives Development, Inc. today added a Server Edition to the existing Client Edition of TeamStudio CIAO!. TeamStudio CIAO! Server Edition is an optional add-on to the standard Client Edition. Server Edition runs on a Domino server, and protects a database design from being updated by anything other than the person who has the affected element checked out, or locked.

Check out this article about this high school in California that certainly isn’t Beverly Hills 90210. At New Technology High School, kids take classes on using Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes.