DMS offers $5 Notes upgrade

Lockheed Martin Corp. is offering an early-buy program to Lotus Development Corp. Notes users who want to upgrade to the Defense Message System version of the product. Under the program, registered Lotus Notes users who buy off the contract can upgrade to the Notes DMS version for $5.

Lotus is one of three messaging vendors on the DMS contract, awarded one year ago to Loral Federal Systems, now part of Lockheed Martin Federal Systems. The other major software providers are Microsoft Corp. and Enterprise Solutions Ltd. (ESL) .

Joseph Forgione, vice president of business multimedia products at Lotus, said at the AFCEA/TechNet '96 show last week that the special deal is aimed at accelerating the deployment of Notes as part of the DMS infrastructure. Also, Lotus already has a large installed base of Notes users in the Defense Department, and the early-buy program answers the question of "If we upgrade to Notes today, will that work with DMS?" Forgione said.

"The answer is yes; now we've got a program in place," he said.

Meanwhile, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and ESL's suite of products are all one step closer to being DMS-certified. Lotus will complete Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile-conformance product testing in the next several weeks, while Microsoft and ESL have already completed that evaluation. Within the next 30 days, users will start to see products available on the DMS contract, said Jeff Drake, director of U.S. sales at ESL.

Meanwhile, the DMS compliance and interoperability testing will be completed by the end of July, said Fred Augusti, vice president of DMS at Lockheed Martin. Functional, security and performance (FSP) testing, running in parallel, is scheduled to start in late June.

There are 13 sites; four will conduct FSP testing, and nine will conduct Initial Operational Test and Evaluation testing. In addition, there are four pilot sites that will test a complete system setup as well as beta code that will be integrated into DMS. The four pilots will take place at the Defense Information Systems Agency; Gunther Air Force Base, Ala.; a secret pilot site; and one pilot conducted by the intelligence community.