In two weeks, IBM Software's Lotus group is slated to show off new development goodies, including Workplace Designer and a new release of Domino Designer, industry sources said.

The toolsets are part of the company's latest attempt to persuade developers and customers that there's life in the venerable Domino franchise.

Though Workplace Designer was mentioned at the Rational Software Development User Conference last summer, this introduction would be the Eclipse-based toolset's coming-out party. The software promises to enable traditional Domino developers to continue working with their existing skills without retraining, IBM sources said.

Due out later this year, Workplace Designer builds on the open-source Eclipse framework and stands to give programmers and developers a full-fledged arsenal. It would be positioned vis-a-vis the currently shipping Workplace Builder targeting nonprogrammers.

On Friday, Ken Bisconti, vice president of workplace, portals and collaboration at IBM Software, confirmed that Workplace Designer will be a big part of the Lotusphere festivities. But he added that the company also will highlight the next release of Domino Designer with better support of popular Web services.

One source characterized Workplace Designer as "the ultimate successor to Domino Designer." Bisconti might dispute that, since the company is bending over backward to discuss future releases of the Notes client and the Domino server, as well as the Domino Designer development tool.

Lotus has already spoken generally about Notes and Domino releases 7, 8 and beyond (the current release is 6.5.3). The company also has put on a full-court press to reaffirm its commitment to Notes/Domino--and Workplace, too--on IBM's Web site and other venues.

That effort is warranted. Top IBM Software executives wreaked havoc three years ago when they indicated that key Domino innards would be replaced by WebSphere and J2EE-based analogs. Workplace servers evolved out of the IBM WebSphere lineup and offer a full range of functionality, much of it duplicating what Domino and Notes can do.

The message back then was that WebSphere was the strategic play. But since that time, the Domino name and reputation seem to have been rehabilitated within IBM, and the company is trying to repair the damage. It has hosted events seemingly every quarter to update press, analysts and customers on the road map and to pledge allegiance to Domino. Analyst Matt Cain, vice president of the Meta Group, said IBM/Lotus has already started de-emphasizing the Workplace messaging.

Still, confusion remains about how customers should proceed with migrations. IBM has "to keep re-emphasizing this plan because people are still pretty confused about the road map," said one longtime analyst, who requested anonymity. "One of the reasons IBM continually briefs the press about it is they want to convince themselves."

Mark Levitt, vice president of collaborative computing at research firm IDC, agreed that IBM now has to explain that Workplace and Domino technologies work together and provide a uniform view to the user. He and other industry observers said that with the various toolsets--up to and including Rational's professional offerings--IBM/Lotus is making a run at the application dominance of the Microsoft Visual Studio.Net suite.

Also to be previewed at Lotusphere: Notes and Domino 7 releases, which aim offer tighter integration with Workplace. Starting this year with Notes 7, users will be able to use Notes as a plug-in component inside the rich Workplace client, a capability that Lotus previewed in prototype last year.

The new release is expected to let developers publish Notes applications, agents or scripts as Web services that can be tapped by external applications, Bisconti said. "You will be able to publish WSDL directly from Notes," he noted, referring to the Web Services Description Language.

The company will try to draw a clearer picture of the Domino/Notes/Workplace map at the big show, which for the first time will include a Workplace Forum track, along with more sessions on core Domino and Notes application development capabilities, Bisconti said.