LotusLive Notes: Open for business!
August 10 2010
This morning, we channel announced LotusLive Notes, with service availability on August 24. We also announced Notes/Domino 8.5.2, with eGA on August 24. Like I have been saying, it's a busy August.
LotusLive Notes has been gliding down a very smooth track towards taking the mantle of best SaaS messaging and collaboration offering. We announced the new multi-tenant Domino solution in January, went to beta in April, deployed a key customer in limited availability in June, and are now activating the service in August. Like most SaaS offerings, we plan updates on a regular basis, with some additional features already queued up for a couple of months out.
Today's announcement marks the clear establishment of LotusLive as the leader in cloud collaboration. LotusLive Notes, enterprise-class mail, calendar, tasks, and instant messaging, lists at US$5/user/month, including a license for the Lotus Notes 8.5.2 client. While it matches the competition on key checkboxes like 25 GB mailbox quotas, rich messaging features, and ease of access, we beat up on Microsoft Exchange Online by running the latest version of our server software, including the Lotus Notes client in the base price, and including instant messaging in the base price. The Domino team has done an incredible engineering job to establish a true mutli-tenant Domino architecture, running in clustered pairs in multiple IBM data centers and integrated with the rest of LotusLive. We're bringing all our experience with 20 years in the messaging market and 50 years of data center operations. LotusLive Notes is a winner.
Add LotusLive Engage to LotusLive Notes, and the result is the SaaS front-runner. For a list price of US$10/user/month, users get all of the LotusLive Notes capabilities, plus all of the capabilities of LotusLive Engage. This includes our unique and easy approach to file sharing, online emeetings, profiles, activities, forms, and charts. LotusLive Notes and LotusLive Engage are seamlessly integrated, providing a single "dashboard" view with one-click access to all cloud services. If you use LotusLive Notes web (the DWA or Lotus iNotes experience), that just appears as another web service. If you use the Notes client, you're seamlessly authenticated to all the other LotusLive web services, and will have the ability to use plug-ins to connect to LotusLive Meetings and LotusLive Connections.
If you are an existing Lotus Notes/Domino customer, IBM is committing to offering you the best cloud solution at a price that recognizes your investment in Notes/Domino today. We've also done the hard work to support hybrid deployments of cloud- and premises-based Domino environments, connected together, both from a technology and also from a licensing perspective. If you are running a competitor's messaging and collaboration product, now is the time to check out IBM. During beta, we did literally hundreds of preview proposals of LotusLive Notes + Engage for Microsoft Exchange customers, and beta was also successful at diverting attention in some organizations who were needlessly flirting with Google.
We have been hard at work on this offering for a long time. In the SaaS world, we don't get to announce, ship, and then breathe. We've already defined the next update to LotusLive Notes, which should come in October, and then more after that. In addition to my excitement at going public today, I want to extend my congratulations and thanks to everyone in the organization who did the real work. My own team -- Chris Baker, Jan Kenney, Collin Murray, Scott Souder and many others along the way -- have lost sleep and been the creative force to get this project done. Russ Holden, chief architect for Domino, has not only lead this project, but touched every aspect of it along the way. I have been humbled by Russ's ability to sweat the details -- actually, to invent the details, sweat them out, and solve them all at once. I will save the rest of the list for my internal kudos, but all of the rest have worked equally hard to get to today.
Cloud/SaaS collaboration is clearly a game that we need to not just play, but play to win. With today's announcements, I'm confident we are ready to take on and beat the competition. If you haven't checked out LotusLive yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. We'll be adding the LotusLive Notes trial to the site just a few weeks after service availability; you can try out all the other services today. Meanwhile, Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is coming simultaneously, with great improvements for premises-based deployments as well. I'll be blogging about those in the coming days.
Link: lotuslive.com/notes >
Post a Comment
- 2
Werner Motzet | 8/10/2010 9:10:34 AM
Hello Ed,
thanks for this good informations.
On the "announced Notes/Domino 8.5.2" is an old Link:
{ Link }
It shows V.8.5.<b>1</b>
Als one question about the "list price of US$10/user/month" is this price available worldwide or only for one area?
Kind Regards Werner
PS: has your Blog lost the Entry form yesterday?
- 3
Bruce Elgort http://elguji.com | 8/10/2010 9:13:40 AM
As Stuart said Ed - "WOW". Great stuff and I look forward to learning more about these offerings over the next few days.
- 4
Mike Kinder http://www.acadiasolutions.com | 8/10/2010 9:18:07 AM
@2 - patience. right after the link he states the websites are not updated yet but will be soon.
@All - Great news! Been waiting for 8.5.2 - I am sure it will be worth the wait. The SaaS offering sounds awesome as well!
- 5
Brett H | 8/10/2010 9:45:46 AM
Very cool Ed, I love it, quite a compelling offer.
Please tell us, are there any marketing plans to get the word out to the potential users of this great service?
- 6
GarryL | 8/10/2010 9:47:45 AM
Sounds really cool.
We are really interested in the on-premise/cloud integration and the pricing for existing Lotus users. When do you think those will be available?
- 7
Werner Motzet | 8/10/2010 9:55:39 AM
Hello,
nice not $10 but now $5 Dollar /month / User?
Are there also Plans to have Traveller for the user(s)?
Kind Regards
Werner
- 9
Ramon Trujillo http://www.atwebplace.com | 8/10/2010 11:11:34 AM
Is there any plan to lift the minimum 25 users requirement? I'll love to move my email from google, but I don't have 25 users yet.
- 11
tony | 8/10/2010 12:18:57 PM
what about Notes applications other than mail?
- 12
Henning Heinz | 8/10/2010 2:49:26 PM
It is a hot price against Google and Microsoft but at least Google does not have premises-based deployments.
60$ compared to 99$ + server licenses + cluster option + hardware (incl. PVU fun) + internal IT or Business Partner support + backup + anti-virus spam fighting + IBM license audit fun (and much more).
Great for fighting Google but Business Partners will have a tougher job to justify on-site deployments.
- 13
Michael | 8/10/2010 3:17:39 PM
Ed, this is really great news. I hope this is an excellent marketing lead and would certainly be worth putting marketing money into.
@9@10 Same here, love to move gmail based domain to LotusLive. Any plans for mailbox migration tools to be included - that would create unbelievable buzz!
- 14
Giulio http://www.buzznotes.com.au | 8/10/2010 7:38:26 PM
Good to see this sort of Notes client offering. The final piece of the puzzle (for me at least), is some sort of hosting option for Web or Notes applications.
BP's are well placed to act on this locally for clients and get them up and running in this sort of cloud arrangement, and would present a total solution. Right now the message coming out of IBM has excluded applications which gives Google and MS an advantage, because IBM have removed this aspect from the conversation your competitors are having with your customers.
So an official spray from IBM would go a long way to penetrating the consciousness of many CIO's who are whistling the Sharepoint tune, (especially in Australia), to the point that it's deafening. Hope you can shed some light on this.
- 15
Nathan T. Freeman http://ntf.gbs.com | 8/10/2010 8:20:51 PM
I have to say that I am LOVING this comment thread. :-)
- 17
Michelle O’Rorke http://michelles-universe.blogspot.com | 8/10/2010 10:50:21 PM
Hi Ed
Is there any change of supported platforms for 8.5.2? In particular, is Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard edition (64 bit)officially supported?
- 18
David (The Notes Guy in Seattle) | 8/10/2010 11:55:25 PM
@9, @13, hey, whadda ya say we pool together and buy a block of 25? Hey Ed, can I resell those to my friends? ;-)
Better yet, will you be ramping up staff to support LL?
With numbers like that, CTO's and CFO's would be fools to ignore this solution. I don't care what kind of shop you are, that's just good business.
- 19
David (The Notes Guy in Seattle) | 8/10/2010 11:57:09 PM
BTW, does Symphony fit in here somewhere?
- 20
Kim Udklit http://www.sjaelsoe.dk | 8/11/2010 12:26:16 AM
Nice stuff, but !!
Announcing Traveller support for WM6.5 in 2010 and missing Android is really bad timing!!Bet you that WP7 will be supported on the day, if ever, that Microsoft releases it. And, why is there a TWO month delay in nationalized versions??
- 21
Werner Motzet | 8/11/2010 1:38:04 AM
@20 there is no TWO month delay. You can not match the english download version with the national CD-Version!
Please look again ther are only 18 Days between the english and the national CD-Version.
So when you use this difference also for the Downloadversion: national Version (as german) would be available on 11th September. When you use the same difference as on Version 8.5.1: one Month the Date will be 24th Semptember.
As Eds Server was down on 10th Aug. His Blog entry from 9th Aug. is lost. But in this Entry he wrote about a "short time" only some weeks.
Kind Regards Werner
- 22
Tony Hollingsworth http://twitter.com/LotusEnergizers | 8/11/2010 2:17:33 AM
Ed
This is very good news - congratulations to you and your team for bringing this together at last. Worth the wait!
I have broadcasted it out on my Twitter channels:
{ Link }
{ Link }
The excitement here in Sydney is electric - we have Alistair Rennie presenting tomorrow, and the "Email is Dead" panel-discussion/webinar featuring Alistair/RIM/Intel at 12pm AEST which will be filmed and archived (I am attending as a member of the media - connected media) so you will be able to view it online later. See { Link } for more details.
Congratulations again - #LotusKnows !
Tony
- 23
Herbert Wagger http://www.i-bank.at | 8/11/2010 2:40:50 AM
Hi Ed,
first of all congratulations.
Is the included Notes 8.5.2 client intended to run in the cloud, or do clients need to install it on premises ?
- 24
Alexey Katyushyn | 8/11/2010 5:10:38 AM
Ed, my congratulations!
I'm tired of waiting for 8.5.2 beta to test new features of xPages, and now release!
Is it already available document on the new features of release?
Specifically I am interested in Domino Directory Independence for the standard release LND (not for SaS, cloud, etc), as IBM promised earlier.
- 25
Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 8/11/2010 7:43:52 AM
For Domino applications in the cloud you can use Amazon EC2, at least for the development portion: { Link } . I'm assuming at some point this will be expanded to include production.
@24 - DI (as promised) in Domino has been dead for a while: "We have made the business decision to leverage DI in IBM's hosted offerings, but there are no plans to provide this Directory Independence capability in Domino." { Link } You do have some options, though, and that article spells them out.
- 28
Steve | 8/11/2010 11:02:27 AM
Is 8.5.2 the best yet, or is it going to beed 4 to 6 fix packs before it's really ready for an enterprise environment? I hear FP4 for 8.5.1 was almost pulled after it was released and it looks like a FP5 is on the way. There sure seem to be a lot of fix packs these days. Is IBM really doing all it can in the quality control area or are too many bugs and regressions being introduced?
- 29
Henry Ferlauto | 8/11/2010 3:07:48 PM
All good progress. Would one assume that getting below the 25 user minimum is directly tied to credit card processing?
- 30
Scott Vrusho | 8/11/2010 4:22:11 PM
@17 - Windows 2008 R2 (32 and 64 bit) is being tested now. We will announce version support once testing is complete. If no code changes are needed, we will likely automatically support 8.5.2 and 8.5.1. If code changes needed, we will define minimum software level afterwards. This will be technoted and posted in the release notice section of the fix list db: { Link }
@28 - Each release improves quality and deployability. Our fix pack strategy is intended to give customers access to critical fixes well before the next maintenance release ships. In 2010, that means fix packs every 2 months. The more frequent shipping of fix packs has been a request of customer to get important bug fixes earlier in a well tested package without needing to get a hot fix or wait for the next release. It is optional to install fix packs ahead of the next maintenance release unless you see value in gaining access to those bug fixes earlier. Fix packs every 2 months for 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 was designed, planned, and staffed early in 2009 and is not a reflection on the release quality. It merely gives IBM and customers an expected avenue for delivering well tested fixes, earlier than before, on a pre-planned schedule.
- 31
Steve | 8/12/2010 9:12:48 AM
@30 - If the fixes being delivered are "well tested fixes" as you said then why do the fixes themselves introduce so many regressions and new flaws? Some of them have been major issues, like FP3 creating issues for transactions logging and making the domino server PANIC. How is that well tested? Another minor issue with the current release not properly mapping the font sizes when users with iPhones reply to messages. Each reply keeps increasing the font size, how is that well tested? The current release still has major issues with printing depending on which default browser you have set, or if you try to print from the preview pane vs opening the email. Sometimes you get the lotus print dialog and other times you get a standard windows dialog, how is that well tested? There are many more minor issues like this that really have a huge impact on the end users experience. I think IBM needs to redefine well tested!
- 32
Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 8/12/2010 9:28:23 AM
@28 - 8.5.2 is the best yet. I found it unusable. Your mileage will likely vary since I'm hypercritical of Notes these days.
- 33
Scott Vrusho | 8/12/2010 9:51:57 AM
Hello Steve - Sounds like you have had some bad experiences. The goal of fix packs is to make the product better. Fix packs will not address all defects, just the more critical ones we have fixes for. The focus is on critical crash, hang, security, or regression issues. We also exclude fixes that come with too much risk that need a lengthier maintenance release test cycle. If a fix pack introduces a regression, that is of major concern to us and we have a process in place to take corrective action on these test escapes. I suspect the font mapping and printing issues were pre-existing defects that were not addressed in the 100+ fixes we put into the fix pack. I reviewed the list of known regression defects in 8.5.1 FP3 and do not find any reported transaction logging defects. Was this a pre-existing issue or do you think it was introduced in 8.5.1 fix pack 3?
Drop me an email if you would like to discuss in further detail. Happy to have a phone conversation as well. I can also look into your list more comprehensively. For example, trying to map your issue list to existing defect #'s and see if they have been addressed or are on the list to be addressed in a future release. For example, font increasing with internet replies has been a long standing issue that I believe we have addressed in 8.5.2. But I want to make sure I understand the iPhone nuance (fyi - I use iPhone for mail via Traveler and don't see the issue).
Well tested means the fix pack net/net will make the product better. The defects we say we have fixed in the fix pack are fixed, are good defect fixes that customers want, and have a very low rate of introducing regressions compared to bug fixes and regressions fixed.
- 34
Steve | 8/12/2010 10:12:10 AM
@33 - I believe the transaction logging issues was just recently discovered, it was not fixed in FP3 but introduced by FP3. Support just had to give me a custom hot fix for it. I was told by support that FP4 was supposed to fix the known issue, but not to install FP4 because it was possibly being pulled. Then I got an email saying, never mind FP4 is ok to install. That didn't give me a lot of confidence, I stuck with the Hot fix for now.
Maybe IBM's definition of critical needs adjusted too. I understand that you all want to fix the issues that are causing the crashes. However, some of the minor issues actually hold more weight because they impact the end users experience. I'd love to have a conversation with you about this stuff, let me know how to get in touch with you.
- 35
Scott Vrusho | 8/12/2010 10:41:13 AM
Steve - drop me an email. I'm going to use a standard that prevents crawl programs from picking it up :-) Firstname_Lastname@us.ibm.com my post should be showing me as scott_vrusho I agree with you on non-crash issues. I can explain our weighting system and how it is designed to catch these annoyances that have high end user impact.
- 36
Alan | 8/13/2010 4:15:35 AM
So the Notes client is included in the price. Can we use that same client to access our on-premise app & mail servers or do we still need a CAL for that? If we ever went to this solution it would be as a hybrid deployment and if a LL user could access on-premise apps without the need for a CAL that would make it a complete no-brainer financially given our current pricing for on-premise.
- 38
Timothy J. Massey http://www.obscorp.com | 8/13/2010 8:33:10 AM
This was asked (@11) but AFAICT not answered: does LLN include the ability to host custom Domino applications? If not, is there a feature that can be added to allow this?
LLN is compelling for many of our clients, except that many of them have custom Domino databases! :)
- 40
Michael Falstrup http://www.intelliglobe.dk | 8/19/2010 6:55:29 AM
Hey ED
I don't know where to put this, so here it is. Could you please comment on this or make a Blog post on it, because this i hilarious:
{ Link }
Please read the comments, just prove the points from the "Pandora's box" discussion, that IBM is actually working AGAINST its own brands.
{ Link }
- 41
Dwain A Wuerfel | 9/4/2010 12:11:11 AM
Ed,
I was trying to install a widget for my boss today and her pc wasn't having anything to do with it. She has Windows 7 with Notes 8.5.1. Do you think if I install 8.5.2 it will work?
Thanks,
Dwain
Wow Ed, I can't ever remember hearing you sound so excited about an announcement.
Congratulations to all the team on getting to this launch. Can't wait to see it in action!