Lotus in the clouds: reconnaissance in battle

    At the Lotusphere 2009 conference in the second half of January , IBM presented its social networking tool system called LotusLive . Thus, in the cloud wars of the giants, another battle began. This time, battles are fought on the front of Enterprise 2.0 . B The main participants in these battles are giants such as IBM and Microsoft, who recently announced the launch of their SharePoint Online . In this note, we will focus on IBM LotusLive.


    Rather, these are not yet full fights, but rather reconnaissance in battle :

    “Both warring parties are in a hurry to stake out in the minds of their existing and potential customers that they have all the necessary Enterprise 2.0 tools. They are in a hurry that these poor clients, along with the bulk of observers, are completely confused about where the alpha ends and where the beta begins, what you can buy today, and what is unlikely to appear even tomorrow, what services are available or are out , and what else is only in the distant plans of the developers. ”



    LotusLive is a family of interactive web-based tools for business communication and collaboration that go beyond the customer’s corporate walls. What is included or will be included in this family, and what services the enterprise-customer (together with its customers) can receive today or in the foreseeable future.

    LotusLive products are divided into two groups:

    1. Products that provide, in fact, typical social networking services (Networking & Collaborating) :
    - LotusLive Engage (registration for participation in beta testing is open - you can try)
    - LotusLive Connections (coming soon - wait )

    2.Products for organizing and conducting various kinds of web events (Web Conferencing):
    - LotusLive Meetings (you can subscribe to the first services, there is a demo version)
    - LotusLive Events (the first services also went on sale)

    One way or another, so far less and then, to a greater extent, all these products are integrated with Lotus office “boxed” products and, first of all, with a pair of Lotus Notes-Lotus Domino, the corresponding equivalents of MS Outlook-MS Exchange Server.

    Unlike Microsoft, IBM has not yet made public its plans for the appearance of cloud versions of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino (in any case, I have not seen such information). On the transfer to the clouds Lotus 1-2-3 (analogous to MS Excel) and other predecessors of the corresponding Microsoft office programs, I think, there can be no talk at all. Here, IBM lost its war completely and irrevocably. Bet more on the prospect of integration with relatives from Microsoft. Fortunately, an open platform based on ASP. Net is always at hand.

    But IBM struck from the other side. Strategic partnerships announced with LinkedIn, Skype and Salesforce. How, when and what partner services will be integrated with LotusLive, again hidden in dense fog. However, you must admit that the prospects here are very interesting.

    And now, literally, a few words about each component of LotusLive. At the same time, I’ll say a little more about services related to web events, as less common for social networking systems.

    LotusLive Engage is a subset of services for the preparation and conduct of web events, expanded by a number of standard social switching services.

    A web-conferencing event is any meeting, conference, seminar, etc., conducted over the Internet. This group of services includes:

    Application share - sharing computer programs
    Meeting record - logging a web event
    Pol l - polling participants (voting)
    Videocasting - video broadcasting
    SSL encryption - information encoding (information security)
    Online storage - file sharing with the means of labeling (tag)
    Forms - the creation of various forms, including for polls
    Chart Circle Diagram - visualization spreadsheet

    By socio-switching services include:

    the Activities - so all Lotus products is called a cross between a wall (wall) in Facebook and microblogging on Twitter.
    Instant Messaging - LotusLive Connections Instant Messaging

    - The cloud version of LotusConnection. An almost full-fledged set of typical social-switching and social-media (with a greater focus on texts) services inherent in developed Web 2.0 resources. Unfortunately, there is no wiki. LotusLive Connections seems to be the new name for what IBM first announced as Bluehouse . In any case, if you try to access bluehouse.lotus.com, now you will either get to LotusLive Connections (yesterday), or (today) in general to the LotusLive homepage.

    LotusLive Meetings is a cloud version of Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting. A complete set of services for hosting web events. In addition to the corresponding services included in LotusLive Engage, this includes the following services:

    Hosting- hosting the event
    Publishing - web publishing for participants of documents (files) from the
    Voice Conferencing repository - holding a teleconference (audio only)
    Recording - recording to the course of the event
    Audiocasting - audio broadcasting
    Roster - an operational tool for the host

    LotusLive Events - cloud version of Lotus Sametime Unyte Events. A complete set of services for preparing web events (including registration of participants) and subsequent analysis of its results.

    As far as I know, the first of the four products listed (LotusLive Engage) is intended for standalone use as a tool that provides a subset of the sum of the services of the other three products. At the same time, LotusLive Connections, LotusLive Meetings, and LotusLive Events can (and best of all) be used in integrated mode.

    The following note provides a conceptual comparison of IBM LotusLive with MS SharePoint Online, its main competitor in this area.

    I remind you that the general chronicle of battles on the front of cloud-based Enterprise 2.0 is given in my previous article .

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