Six government departments in Tasmania have committed to a Lotus enterprise licence agreement boosting the number of Notes clients from 3000 to 4000.
Spearheaded by the Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment, the agreement also involves the departments of Treasury, Police and Emergency, State Development, Justice, and Public Trustees.
Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment corporate IT manager Sen Dharmadasa made the initial move to Lotus Notes in 1997 from Eudora and other mail applications.
"Now the department doesn't need to continue re-negotiating contracts for our mail infrastructure, the replication features of Notes gives us the option of not running everything off a central server," he said.
The departments are using the latest Notes 6 client with version 5.1 on the Windows 2000 servers.
"We are using Notes for much more than just e-mail and calendaring. For example, the police department recently did a large transaction project involving some 300,000 records," Dharmadasa said.
"Being essentially a J2EE and Oracle shop at the backend, we enjoy using Notes for smaller projects, because we can quickly develop Web-based applications."
Dharmadasa said the department’s intention is to use Notes for records and e-mail management.
"Our department is looking at new ways to organise our electronic records and with Notes we don't need another software layer in order to archive documents. We are also looking at an in-house application to capture and store e-mails," he said.
Dharmadasa, who was reluctant to disclose pricing, said the department had considered other collaboration platforms before proceeding to upgrade Notes
He said the department is not using the Quickplace collaboration tool but it can be added later.
IBM regional manager for Lotus Australia and New Zealand Max McLaren said this agreement represents one of the larger regional Notes government customers.