Lotus Offers Mentor™ Just-in-Time
Support for Notes

A Powerful New Way to Master Lotus Notes

South Norwalk, Connecticut, USA, 20 September 1998 -- Lotus Development Corporation has announced it is offering Mentor™ for Lotus Notes, a network-based, just-in-time, multimedia support and learning system for Notes users, which can substantially smooth and shorten Notes rollouts and upgrades, minimize growth and turnover problems, and dramatically cut support costs.

The IT world has been looking forward to just-in-time, multimedia performance support for a long time. With Mentor, Lotus is making it available to every Notes user, installable today, at a very low cost. Whether people have some formal Notes training or not, back on the job, they can have an expert coach to help them master the full power of Notes.

Mentor™ for Lotus Notes is comprehensive. With sight and sound "How Do I" demonstrations, it covers over 200 end user functions—Mail, Calendar, Scheduling, Documents, Databases, Replication, etc.—and its "Tell Me About" section gives conceptual and functional overviews of all the major Notes processes. With just a SmartIcon click or bookmark, one can open the Mentor database, then keyword search or drill down to find the right item, just like text Help. Using high compression and bit streaming, Mentor delivers its material through LANs, Intranets, or the Internet to workstations with 28.8kbps or faster connection, without downloading.

"It's not really a new paradigm," said Dan Gallo, VSI's CEO. "It's the oldest learning paradigm—personal mentoring. Technology is allowing us to use it again, and it's just as powerful as ever. Most people's favorite way to learn is to ask someone who knows. Mentor™ for Lotus Notes just puts your 'someone who knows' right in your workstation—except this one is always there, and always right."

Mentor is already installed in companies of various sizes, including IBM, DuPont, Colgate-Palmolive, Duke Energy, Transamerica, State Farm Insurance, Reuters, Canon, Phillips Petroleum, Bayer, and many smaller companies who want a faster, cheaper way to help their people master Notes. As a Notes database, Mentor has all the residence and replication flexibility of Notes database management. It can be installed in a Notes system in a few hours, and it is small enough to reside on a laptop hard drive. Because it is network resident and replicable, there are no distribution or version control problems or costs.

Mentor's cost is really low. It costs less per person than an extra half hour in class, a good user guide, or one Help Desk call. It's a real bargain, especially for companies whose users are geographically dispersed. It's usually justified by support savings alone, and if you count the value of getting the benefits of Notes and Notes applications months earlier, the ROI can be very high.

Product reviewers can get an evaluation copy of Mentor™ for Lotus Notes on CDROM by emailing mailto:sales@trymentor.com. Please give your name, publication, FedEx address (no P.O. boxes), telephone number, and a brief description of your product or market specialty.

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Lotus, Lotusphere and Lotus Notes are registered trademarks and Notes and Domino are trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation. All other brands and product reference herein are the trademark or registered trademark of their respective holders.

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