I’ve been spending a lot of time presenting Lotus’ upcoming collaborative solutions over the past few months, and the reaction has been very positive. Perhaps “very positive” doesn’t do the reaction justice – people love the new stuff… Quickr, Connections and Notes 8.

Today was no exception, I provided two stand-up routines at an open day hosted by InfoSys, a Lotus Business Partner. You know me, I love an audience, and they seemed to like my positioning of Mentos Mints and Diet Coke movies on YouTube as an example of community innovation. You had to be there, but it got a big laugh (and I think they got the point too).

I spoke to many of the attendees after my sessions and during the day, and there were three main themes. They love Quickr. They love Connections (and get the idea of social software in the enterprise). And increasingly people are becoming very receptive to the idea that there is a cheaper and viable alternative to Microsoft Office… namely the Productivity Editors embedded into Notes 8.

The premise is simple… Notes customers are already paying for Notes, and we will provide them with spreadsheet, word processor and presentation editor functionality for no extra license charge. In other words, they get the Microsoft Office functionality that they pay for today free with the Notes 8 client. That means that for large numbers of users they can save on the cost of an Office license.

For customers with mixed estates including Linux and Mac client users, the news is even better. No longer the poor cousins, they will experience the same functionality as their Window-using colleagues (Mac to be supported post-Notes 8.0). The thought of supporting the Open Document Format and freeing themselves from proprietary document formats is also very compelling.

There is one interesting perception that I always comment upon and challenge… the idea that organisations could keep Office for their power-users and provide the Notes 8 editors to the rest. That implies that they think the Notes 8 editors are a cut-down offering… they’re not, these are extremely functional editors.

I didn’t expect the battle against Office to be easy, and I’m realistic about the fact that Notes 8 is not going to make a huge impact on their market share in the next year. But I am pleasantly surprised by the number of people who are taking this proposition very seriously and thinking that they could save themselves a lot of money.