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Celebrating 25 Years

Lotus sets dynamic intranet duo flying on their own


FastSite makes posting Web documents in 25 file formats easy and fast, without webmaster intervention. It removes the document-posting bottleneck for intranets.


FastSite converts documents easily, and SmartCenter puts a Web portal, with links, on your screen

By Jason Byrne
GCN Staff

Microsoft Corp. is working to pull all of its products into its office software suite, but Lotus Development Corp. is doing the opposite. It recently let loose two standalone products that had gotten their start in SmartSuite.

FastSite 2.0 and SmartCenter 1.0 are two very different products, each independent but also continuing to flock with the other applications in SmartSuite.



FastSite is an easy tool for converting office documents, such as memos and spreadsheets, into formatted Web documents ready for posting. It works with 25 file types including those of Lotus, Microsoft and Corel Corp.

Box Score       
FastSite
Easy publisher for Internet or intranet

Lotus Development Corp.
Cambridge, Mass.
tel. 800-555-5555
www.lotus.com
Price: $115 retail, free in SmartSuite Millennium Edition

+ Translates various documents into publishable Web content
+ Works with Lotus, Microsoft and Corel formats
- Customization difficult beyond basic templates



Real-life requirements:
Windows 9x or NT 4.0, 16M of RAM, 10M free storage, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 or higher browser version

SmartCenter
Individual user’s information portal
Price: Free download until Nov. 1; part of SmartSuite Millennium Edition

+ Places intranet and Internet information unobtrusively
+ Easy to use and customizable by a user or an organization
- Cannot pull contact and schedule information from any outside source except Lotus Organizer

Real-life requirements:
Windows 9x or NT 4.0, 16M of RAM, 12M free storage, browser



What FastSite does best is loosen the bottleneck in posting documents to intranets. Because it can apply a uniform format to each page, no webmaster is needed to format the pages. If content managers have rights to their particular sections of the site, they can take over the entire posting process.

Content cop

FastSite is great to have around to ensure that content does not turn stale because of posting delays. In my tests, it produced uniformly well-formatted Hypertext Markup Language pages. Its integration with Lotus Domino also worked well, which should be a big help to organizations with Domino Web servers.



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