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Many Lotus Notes users spend a good part of their day working inside the Notes interface, leaving only to run a spreadsheet or word processor. With the Lotus Components Starter Pack, those users may never have to leave Notes again. The Starter Pack quite easily takes over a healthy percentage of the tasks normally done with desktop application suites. Lotus has widely circulated the beta version of the Starter Pack, with the product scheduled to ship this summer.
The Starter Pack consists of a set of slimmed-down objects based on Microsoft's ActiveX standard. The controls also use a Notes-specific API that integrates them into the Notes 4.02 interface. The components can be embedded into any Notes document, including E-mail messages.
This fills an important gap in the Notes environment: The Notes 4.02 client for Windows 95 can run OLE server objects-including Microsoft Word and Excel documents-in place, replacing Notes' menus with those of the object's. But the Notes client isn't a full-fledged OLE container-it can't use the full range of OLE objects, including most ActiveX controls, that are available to developers in tools such as Microsoft Visual Basic.
Lotus Components make up for this deficiency. Unlike run-in-place OLE objects, Lotus Components are tightly integrated with the Notes environment, merging with the existing interface of the Notes client rather than replacing it. The components also are integrated with Notes/FX data exchange and the LotusScript language, so that the components can exchange data with Notes databases and be manipulated and customized by Notes developers.
Components take up less memory than applications and launch more quickly inside of Notes. Since they are based on the ActiveX control standard, they also work in other OLE-based applications and tools, including Visual Basic and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0. I incorporated several of the components into Visual Basic applications with no difficulty. In fact, I found developing...