conferences of the year -- Lotusphere 98 in Orlando, Florida -- and The Royal Gazette will be there too.

Jamie Thain, who writes on computer technology for The Royal Gazette's sister magazine, Bottom linbe, will be reporting daily from the conference on the latest Lotus products and developments. Lotus Notes and related software is installed in many local companies' computer networks as well as in home computers.

Lotusphere is a show that caters to all levels of the business infrastructure, with session tracks for technology managers, developers, integrators and solution providers.

Lotus Notes is the dominant theme at the conference. Since IBM purchased Lotus, they have installed more than 10 million sets of Lotus Notes worldwide.

Lotus is expanding to Notes to integrate groupware with the Internet.

Notes-powered -- or "Domino'' sites as the server product is now called -- will be able to extract data, schedules, and manipulate Notes Data directly in a browser.

As the leading groupware supplier, integrating Notes Domino with the Internet allows business to go from concept to web-published as quickly as they can store a document in Lotus Notes. This allows businesses to keep their web content current and interactive, not having to wait until a Webmaster gathers, formats and publishes the information before sending it "live'' to the Internet.

At Lotusphere this week, there will be previews of the Notes 5.0 offering a simplified interface, improved integration with the Web, and full Notes-like access from a browser. They will be previewing the OS/400 server and offering many sessions on wide variety of topics.

This week, Jamie Thain will be investigating how these new technologies will allow businesses to use the web as a weapon of commerce instead of a resource heavy trinket.

Each day for the rest of the week, he will be previewing the technology and meeting with the key Lotus visionaries who are bringing it out.