Lotus in the clouds: reconnaissance

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





Rather, it is not yet full-fledged battles, but rather reconnaissance by combat :

“Both warring parties are in a great hurry to stake in the minds of their existing and potential customers that they have all the necessary means of Enterprise 2.0. So hurry that these poor customers, along with the majority 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 there are or output , and what else only in the distant plans of developers. "

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LotusLive is a family of interoperable web-based business communication and collaboration tools that extend beyond the corporate walls of a customer. What is or will be included in this family, and what services the enterprise-customer (together with its clients) 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 is open to participate in beta testing - 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 turn of services, there is a demo version)

- LotusLive Events (the first stage of services also went on sale)



Anyway, while to a lesser extent, and then to a greater degree, all these products are integrated with office “boxed” Lotus products and, above 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 emergence of the cloud versions of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino (in any case, I have not met such information). I think there can be no talk about the transfer to Lotus 1-2-3 clouds (analogue of MS Excel) and other predecessors of the corresponding Microsoft office programs. Here IBM lost its war completely and irrevocably. The bet is 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 partnership announced with LinkedIn, Skype and Salesforce. How, when, and which partner services will be integrated with LotusLive, again hidden in thick fog. However, you see, the prospects here open up 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-based activities, which are less common for social networking systems.



LotusLive Engage is a subset of services for preparing and conducting web events, expanded by a number of typical social switching services.



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



Application share - computer software sharing

Meeting record - web event logging

Pol l - poll of participants (voting)

Videocasting - video broadcasting

SSL encryption - information encryption (information security)

Online storage - file sharing with labeling tools (tag)

Forms - creation of various forms, incl. for polls

Chart - Spreadsheet Visualization



The social switching services include:



Activities - so in all Lotus products is called something between a wall (wall) on Facebook and microblogging on Twitter.

Instant Messaging - instant messaging



LotusLive Connections is a cloud version of LotusConnection. An almost complete set of typical social-switching and social-media services (with a greater focus on texts) of services inherent in developed Web 2.0 resources. Sorry, the wiki is missing. It seems that LotusLive Connections is a new name for what IBM first announced as Bluehouse . Anyway, if you try to go to bluehouse.lotus.com, now you’ll get either LotusLive Connections (yesterday) or (today already) go to the LotusLive home page.



LotusLive Meetings is a cloud-based version of the Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting. A complete set of services for web events. In addition to the relevant services included in the LotusLive Engage, these include the following services:



Hosting - hosting events

Publishing - web publishing for participants of documents (files) from the repository

Voice Conferencing - holding a teleconference (sound only)

Recording - recording the event on the disc

Audiocasting - audio broadcast

Roster - the operational tool for leading



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



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



The following article 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 the battles on the front of cloud-based Enterprise 2.0 is given in my previous article .