Lotusphere 2000: Lotus jumps into bed with Microsoft

Lotus is to integrate products by arch rival Microsoft into Lotus Notes.

Speaking at this week's Lotusphere conference in Orlando, CEO Jeff Papows said the company will integrate Microsoft's video streaming capabilities and Outlook into the Lotus Notes client.

"We must collaborate with other companies - even those we compete with - to offer the user the maximum choice," he said.

He alsoconceded that Microsoft is a force in this market, but joked that it only has a "relevant offering" compared to Lotus, which he said has a "superior offering."

Lotus Notes currently enjoys a 41 per cent share of the groupware market as opposed to Microsoft's 34 per cent. Novell and Netscape lag behind with an 18 per cent and seven per cent respectively.

As part of the deal to integrate Outlook, Lotus has developed a technology called Domino Offline Services (DOLS) which provides replication from a domino server onto a PC using Outlook.

DOLS enables Notes users to use Outlook as an alternative email client. However, its capabilities are limited and Papows said it will be a long time before users will be able to store Microsoft Office documents in Notes.

However, Ashim Pal, analyst at Meta Group said Lotus has been cautious in its first step to integrate with Microsoft. "It has been a long road for Lotus and they find that they have reached a type of mindset that says they have to co-exist.

"They are platform dependent, especially with Windows NT, and there is a lot of infrastructure that people use on a day to day basis and won't replace. So Lotus is playing by the 80/20 rule and giving the simplest components such as mail exchange and a limited amount of calendering. But if you look closer there is little deeper application integration."

Clive Longbottom, analyst for Strategy Partners agreed. "This is not Microsoft Office integration. Users still won't be able to do a mail merge or store file directories. Lotus is making it so that even at the Outlook level people will complain that the integration does not do what they want it to do. You won't see true integration with this - people will just use Outlook as an email client," he said.