Lotus Debuts LotusLive

Lotus is set to launch LotusLive, an online version of its collaboration suite of applications at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando later today. With LotusLive, IBM becomes the latest collaboration vendor to deliver collaboration services from the cloud. Microsoft has already done so with Microsoft Online Service. Cisco and Oracle followed suit with their Web conferencing tools this fall. Cisco is expected to follow suit in March with the introduction of hosted unified communications services. LotusLive brings together the core components of Notes offering with IBM’s web conferencing and collaboration tools. The software suite, which has been out in some form or another for about a year now under the codename of BlueHouse, already has 15,000 users, says IBM. Looking at the LotusLive page, you can see that the service will consist of six modules. Currently available are the online event management tools. LotusLive Meeting, a packaging of Lotus SameTime Unyte Meetings, provides for running online meetings . LotusLive Events package packaging of Lotus SameTimeUnyte Event and help manage managing online events. Lotus will be adding networking and collaboration tools, namely LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections. LotusLive Engage is an online meeting space.  LotusLive Connetions complements Engage with “file sharing, activity management, instant messaging, and networking capabilities - without the Web meeting service.” I hope that it has more than just a passing connection (pardon the pum) to Lotus Connections, Lotus’ social media software. The third component the e-mail tools LotusLive Notes and LotusLive iNotes. The latter will likely take advantage of last week's IBM acquisition of the e-mail assets of Outblaze, Ltd that enables online access to Notes e-mail. According to Bloomberg, LotusLive ties into software from Salesforce.com and LinkedIn Corp. It also works with BlackBerry phones and software from SAP.