SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.5 review

Lotus has decided to charge for the 9.5 upgrade to SSME, so it would appear that the company feels this is far more than a set of bug fixes and simple enhancements. On the face of it, there's not a great deal to shout about. Admittedly, Organizer has received a complete overhaul and now appears in its brand new Version 5 incarnation (see p132). FastSite skips to its second release, too. But the core applications exhibit no fundamental changes to their functionality, and there are only a handful of enhancements.

FastSite 2.1 seems to have received a less fundamental overhaul than Organizer, although to be fair it received a pretty positive reception first time out. There are a few new templates (basic layouts, including navigation buttons) and increased compatibility with a wider range of applications. FastSite can be briefly described as a Web-site creation and management tool used for incorporating documents created in business productivity applications (such as SSME or Microsoft Office) into simple, template-based Web sites.

The original version included with SSME could only cope with native SmartSuite documents. In accordance with the general trend towards better integration in mixed-suite environments, Lotus introduced support for Office 97 applications into SSME 9.1, now followed by compatibility with Word and Excel 2000 and Quattro Pro. Whereas the previous version of FastSite offered just two final output options - HTML and jDoc (a composite of HTML and embedded Java applets for suitably-enabled browsers) - version 2.1 now offers three output options. These are: SmartSuite/Office HTML (a rich-page format that can only output SSME or Office documents, presuming the native apps are on your PC); Verity HTML (less rich, but able to output documents from applications not present on your PC); and the richest format of all, jDoc (the same mix of HTML and Java, but only operational with documents created in SSME).

Of the rest of the suite's enhancements, the most significant is an update to the ViaVoice runtime engine. This reaches version 5.2, which includes optimised code for Pentium III systems. There are some speed improvements (but then a Pentium III processor should be faster anyway), although ViaVoice still seems to dislike my dulcet tones. It also has a new feature called Talking QuickDemos, which simply walks you through common ViaVoice functions.

For corporate organisations reliant on a Lotus Notes/Domino information-management, workgroup and email system, SSME remains the application suite of choice. Pretty much everything is now Notes/Domino 5 compliant and certain applications now have additional Notes features. For example, Approach now has a fully integrated Notes Reporter. Most SSME applications also have the ability to open and save documents directly from or to a Domino database, streamlining the information-management system. A potential advantage for organisations in the process of rolling Notes installations out is that SSME 9.5 actually includes the full Notes 5 client software in the retail bundle, saving a few quid on licences in the process.

If you point your browser at www.lotus.com and navigate through the SmartSuite product section to the details about version 5, there's a section on Notes integration that should answer some of your professional queries.

Although in certain cases the enhancements really count as bug fixes, Lotus has worked hard to improve the quality of its file-format translation. Like Corel, Lotus realises that if it's to eat into Microsoft's market share, SSME needs to work seamlessly in a mixed-suite environment. Unlike WordPerfect Office 2000, which can't handle Microsoft Office 2000 file formats, SSME does. Not only that, but file formats are 'sticky' - open a Word 2000 file in WordPro and it will remain in that format when saved back out. The quality of the file-format filters is generally high, but you should bear in mind that compatibility isn't 100 per cent. WordPro still has problems with graphics in Word documents and Excel still outguns 1-2-3 on formulae, leading to translation warnings when opening and saving files.