Lotus woos UK colleges

Colleges and universities in the UK are being offered a fixed-price, unlimited licence for Lotus software, for between £400 and £1,000 per year.

The deal, negotiated by the Combined Higher Education Software Team (Chest), covers support and upgrades for the year, and allows students and teachers to use the software at home.

Over 600 academic institutions in the UK currently rely on Microsoft's Select programme for volume licensing of desktop software. But Select expires at the end of November, and although Microsoft has promised to replace it, there have been no signs as yet.

Mark Summerfield, Software Team manager at Chest, said: "We did this deal with Lotus because there are significant concerns that Microsoft won't replace Select, and we have a responsibility to the academic sector. Microsoft has offered a campus agreement as one alternative, but it is only suited to big, wealthy institutions," he said.

Summerfield added: "We have had positive feedback from academic computing centres, who saw the draft details for the first time this week. We are expecting a large number of universities and colleges to take this offer up because it is so incredibly cheap."

The Lotus software deal, branded 'The National Passport for Learning', includes Lotus spreadsheet, word processing, organiser and graphics applications.

Further details are available from http://www.chest.ac.uk/