Papows makes his final Lotus price promise.

Lotus' annual user conference, Lotusphere, has seen the company make three key promises. The groupware supplier vowed in Orlando this week to simplify its pricing structure, make its products available over the web, and make its flagship Lotus Notes package work more closely with products from arch-rival Microsoft.

Lotus said it will integrate Microsoft's Outlook client messaging and calendar product with its own Domino groupware server later this year. Although full details of the new pricing scheme won't be available until March, it is likely to be good news for users who have often been left baffled by Lotus' current licensing labyrinth.

'We will have a pricing scheme that doesn't require the customer to be quite the rocket scientist they had to be in the past,' said outgoing president Jeff Papows, who announced his resignation this month.

Papows said pricing will be based on six types of product, including messaging, collaboration and Domino. 'As the portfolio of products expanded, we failed to keep up with pricing,' he admitted.

Lotus also announced plans to sell its products online through a new service called ePass, which will be launched later this year.

The fourth quarter of 1999 saw the company accumulate 8.5 million new Notes users, bringing its total worldwide user base to 56 million. Papows assured the audience of 5,000 customers that the Outlook initiative did not mean Lotus was throwing in the towel in the client market.

'We will support Outlook as an alternative messaging client for the Domino server. This is consistent with the long held belief that we must collaborate with other companies, even those we compete with, to offer customer choice,' he said. 'We have not conceded the client market here, not one inch.'

'Adding Outlook as a client is a smart move. It introduces Microsoft users to Domino, and will pay off,' said Ovum analyst Eric Woods.

Lotus is winding down its commitment to the elderly cc:Mail messaging client, in the belief that its millions of users will upgrade to Notes. Support is to end in 2001.