In addition to announcing plans to release Notes and Domino 8 for public beta- testing next month, IBM introduced two new Lotus products: an information-sharing tool called Connections, and a collaborative content-sharing program called Quickr.

Hugh Roddick, director of application development at Health Canada's client service center in Ottawa, said the various IBM tools could eventually offer major usability improvements to the government agency's 13,600 users.

Currently, many of the users are forced to rely on paper-based communication or "cobbled-together" electronic tools, Roddick said.

Health Canada has been testing Notes and Domino 8 for several months, and Roddick said the integration of new functionality, such as document-editing tools, into Notes will let users run fewer applications at one time.

Roddick added that Connections could allow Health Canada's in-house knowledge to be cataloged in a central place. And Quickr could enable users to run searches against 5,000 or so Notes document storage repositories, he said.