SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.5

When Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition (SSME) was launched back in autumn 1998 (reviewed issue 49, p172), its main competitors in the marketplace were Microsoft Office 97 and Corel WordPerfect Suite 8. It's a testament to the overall power and usability of Office 97 that SSME didn't even come close to toppling it in terms of general functionality, although Lotus had clearly leapfrogged Corel's offering.

SSME did have two important advantages over Office 97. The first of these was direct file access to intranet or Internet servers. By clicking on the Internet button within standard file open/save dialog boxes, users could load or dump documents from or to Internet servers. Microsoft Office 97, although it incorporated the ability to open or save in HTML format, couldn't access files remotely except by using standard network protocols. Again, WordPerfect Suite trailed even further behind both. SSME really was the first true intranet suite and the significance of this perhaps wasn't fully appreciated.

Voice recognition represented the other feature absent from Microsoft's business applications at the time of SSME's launch. Corel had bundled Dragon's NaturallySpeaking with WordPerfect Suite 8, but Lotus had more closely and effectively integrated IBM's ViaVoice technology with WordPro and 1-2-3.

Moving goalposts

With the launch of SSME 9.5 comes an opportunity to re-evaluate the suite in the context of its current competition, namely Microsoft Office 2000 (reviewed issue 57, p166) and WordPerfect Office 2000 (reviewed issue 59, p178). Both players have clearly taken a long, hard look at the original SSME and played 'catch up' in certain areas. Although I think it's unfair to presume that Microsoft only pulled its socks up in terms of Internet integration in Office 2000 after evaluating SSME, it's clear that several features of SSME are now present in Microsoft's current-generation suite. Office 2000 users can now open and save documents using HTTP or FTP, as well as conventional network protocols. In addition, the improved HTML support in SSME was matched, even comprehensively outdone, by Office 2000. The inclusion of the FastSite Web site creation application in SSME was matched by Microsoft's incorporation of FrontPage into Office 2000 Premium.

Interestingly, Microsoft has chosen to ignore voice recognition as a suite feature in Office 2000. Corel has continued, however, with a 'Voice Powered' edition of WordPerfect Office 2000, which includes Philips FreeSpeech 2000 and a microphone headset. This appears to work extremely well, although I'd stress that voice-recognition applications work well with some voices and not with others. I get better results from FreeSpeech than ViaVoice, but you might not. In the unlikely event that voice recognition is a major part of your corporate strategy, it certainly needs testing prior to rollout.

Before conducting a full re-evaluation of SSME in its new market context, it's useful to look at how Lotus' suite has developed since the original release a year or so ago.

All the nines

The original SSME wasn't originally attributed a version number, but adopted the moniker 9. Lotus quickly responded to problems reported by users and the 9.1 release was rolled out as a free upgrade to 9. It features over 142 individual bug fixes, and while this isn't an impressive tally in itself, Lotus' openness in admitting problems and fixing them is praiseworthy.

Version 9.1 introduced certain enhancements to functionality as well as bug fixes - although not many. Lotus also claims that both performance and usability were tweaked. FastSite was upgraded to work with PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents and the number of templates supplied was increased. There were certain file format compatibility issues addressed, such as 1-2-3 being able to read documents created in versions of Excel prior to Office 97.