Lotus delays release of Raven

The release of Raven, a knowledge management suite being developed by Lotus, has been delayed until the end of the year.

The software, which aggregates internet content and personal productivity files into a single portal, was originally expected to ship this summer.

Raven was unveiled at the company's Lotusphere Europe event in October 1999 and the summer shipment date was announced at the Cebit tradeshow in Germany in February 2000.

According to Martha Tacy, director of knowledge management segment marketing, the delay is due to the technical complexity of the product and feedback from customers that are currently testing the beta version.

"It is complicated because of the automated text taxonomies. Raven crawls for information and places it according to themes such as news and travel. These are then sub-categorised and then further sub-categorised," explained Tacy.

"We are putting spiders out to data sources to understand and categorise that data. All this is done automatically. With other systems you have to provide all that information upfront," she added.

Raven offers three main functions, all of which are aggregated within a portal-type interface on a user's desktop. First is access to web content and other files from a variety of data sources; second is Team Spaces, which helps companies monitor what their competitors are doing through external news and information servers; and third is a portal user interface which allows companies to organise activities across all of their teams.

Raven is expected to be released as a standalone product for organisations with huge data sources, but Tacy believes it could also be licensed to general purpose portal providers such as Yahoo.