The Sunday night party around the reflection pools at the Dolphin and the Swan were the usual food buffet, beer-and-wine-bar-hopping affairs that they have been historically. Mercifully missing from these were the normally excessive number of free giveaways from the major sponsors. Also, different from years past, no one rappelled or climbed down anything to make a big splashy entrance. Again, I guess the theme was a little bit more subdued than in years past.

Let the games begin
Monday morning dawned bright and early in Orlando, and those in the know (the ones that have the correct color badges) get there even earlier for the opening presentation. With a brief keynote address given by Walter Cronkite, the festivities kicked off with Jeff Papows giving the worldview from Cambridge. Highlights from the speech include Jeff saying, "The company is at the absolute peak of its product and business strength as we enter this new millennium."

The numbers
He then went onto recount the Lotus Notes sales numbers for 1999:

• Fourth-quarter sales of Lotus Notes were 8.5 million new users (allegedly Lotus' single greatest quarter ever);

• The total sales of new Lotus Notes seats in 1999 were counted in at 22 million;

• The total estimated Lotus Notes users at the end of 1999 was 56 million.

The keynote
Let me save you some time from having to read Jeff Papows' keynote speech by highlighting his major announcements here. According to Jeff, the major goals for Lotus in 2000 are:

• To maintain the lead in what they termed " collaborative infrastructure" (2nd generation messaging);

• To create and dominate the rapidly emerging Distance-Learning market;

• To develop valuable knowledge management applications (an initiative code named Raven);

• To continue to try to position Domino as a general-purpose web application platform by providing improved integration and support for IBM's Websphere product.

Probably the most surprising information that came from Jeff's keynote speech was the announcement that Lotus will support Microsoft Outlook as an alternative client to the Lotus Domino server for messaging, calendaring, and scheduling. Jeff was quick to point out that they were not conceding the client market to Microsoft. He feels that Lotus Notes is a "fundamentally superior product". He stated that their goal in adding support for Outlook was to be responsive to clients and business partner demand and recognize that Microsoft Office is a potent force in the marketplace.

He also went on to acknowledge the fact that the Lotus pricing model has been fairly difficult to decipher in the past, at one point saying that their new strategy will not require customers to be rocket scientists. This brought a great laugh from the crowd. So the good news is that the pricing will get simpler. The bad news is that the price is getting higher (more on this later on in this article).