LotusLive Notes update coming up to beta

March 23 2010

Last week, I realized I hadn't been blogging too much about my day job recently...sort of that post-Lotusphere quiet that presumes we used up all the good news in Orlando and won't have anything more for a while.  Of course, it's not at all quiet -- mostly, we come back from Lotusphere with a better understanding of what to focus on for the year, and align accordingly.

A lot of what my team and I are spending time on is building out the mid-2010 update to LotusLive Notes.  We announced this update at Lotusphere as a major expansion of our SaaS Domino offering.  LotusLive Notes offer cloud-based Domino messaging services for a low, fixed price per-user per-year, as part of the overall LotusLive environment.  There are both technical and business activities in flight on this new version, and while several of them will have to wait for public announcements, I can give you a flavor of what we're up to.

Technically, we've fine-tuned Domino for the SaaS architecture.  Much of this is behind-the-scenes implementation for use in our own data centers, but some of these features will eventually be incorporated into Domino updates for your on-premises environments.  For example, on the server side, Domino-as-LotusLive Notes has the ability to run in a truly multi-tenant environment, completely separating process and data for multiple instances in a single server.  On the client side, Notes 8.5.2 will have a few distinct new features for use with LotusLive Notes, including a robust local cache which improves Notes behaviors in a clustered environment.  Of course, LotusLive Notes will feature Domino's best-in-class iNotes for web access, though I'll just get it on the table now that the UI will call it "LotusLive Notes web" so as not to be confused with its sister, LotusLive iNotes.

On the business side, much of what we are up to relates to how we price and package LotusLive Notes, offer services like mobility and archiving, and plan for customers who want to move to cloud (or run a hybrid environment of cloud and on-premises Domino).  One advantage of the software-as-a-service model, of course, is that we can address some of these requirements over time -- though in IBM's view, SaaS doesn't mean daily, whiplash updates, but rather continued planning and staging as services update and evolve.

We'll be going to beta with this updated service in a few weeks, starting with beta participants in North America and then expanding out.  The beta program is not for "tire kickers" -- we are looking for serious testers who will sustain their testing activity as beta progresses.  If you are interested, let me know.

Ed Brill | Lotusphere Comes to You, St Louis MO USA Category:  Lotus  LotusLive  IBM Lotus  Add/View Comments [16]

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  1. 1  Richard Schwartz http://www.poweroftheschwartz.com | 3/24/2010 5:05:06 AM

    "So as not to be confused..."? Sorry, Ed. It's too late for that.

  1. 2  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 3/24/2010 7:51:44 AM

    @1 - Yep. LotusLive iNotes is the OutBlaze platform that IBM acquired. It's not the Domino-based iNotes that everyone already knows. I guess it made sense to someone to cannibalize the name of an existing product that's already widely deployed and use it to mean something completely different.

  1. 3  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 3/24/2010 8:05:28 AM

    @2 because "web-based email" is something completely different than what iNotes is?

  1. 4  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 3/24/2010 11:38:21 AM

    @3 - I wasn't aware of that change, so I stand corrected. As far as I knew iNotes became Domino Web Access and was renamed back to iNotes. I apologize if I missed an announcement somewhere.

  1. 5  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 3/24/2010 11:40:01 AM

    @3 - { Link } "Lotus iNotes - Web based email software". Please pardon my confusion.

  1. 6  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 3/24/2010 12:14:56 PM

    @4/5 yes, that's my point. They are both Web based email software. So it's not something "completely different" than what the existing already widely deployed product.

  1. 7  David Bell  | 3/24/2010 12:19:30 PM

    @6 - if customers truly did not care about how the service is delivered in the cloud, I think this is ok.

    The problem is that customers are not yet at a point with cloud where they are happy to not care about what infrastructure is providing the service.

    Every customer I talk with wants to understand that detail, regardless of whether it materially impacts their consumption of the service.

  1. 8  Rod Stauffer  | 3/24/2010 12:59:40 PM

    @6: Point is, the naming you've outlined does nothing to avoid confusion. A SaaS product that has absolutely nothing to do with iNotes will continue to be named "LotusLive iNotes", while the actual SaaS version of iNotes will be called something else (LotusLive Notes web). Tell me again how the two won't be confused with each other?

    Seems to me there's two approaches that would be far less confusing:

    - neither SaaS offering is called LotusLive iNotes

    or

    - the SaaS offering based on iNotes is the one called LotusLive iNotes

    This isn't difficult. Then again, we're talking about IBM product names.

  1. 9  Dami  | 3/24/2010 3:31:41 PM

    The connection has timed out

    The server at www.lotuslive.com is taking too long to respond

    * The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few

    moments.

    * If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network

    connection.

    * If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure

    that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

  1. 10  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 3/24/2010 3:57:54 PM

    @6 - Oh, I misread your intent. I thought you were saying that iNotes was not web-based e-mail. LotusLive iNotes and Lotus Domino iNotes both offer web-based e-mail, but they are obviously not the same product and they don't even run on the same platform. That is what I meant about LotusLive iNotes being a completely different product using the established Lotus Domino iNotes name.

  1. 11  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 3/24/2010 4:37:47 PM

    Well a good thing is when I saw iNotes in LotusLive iNotes is that I thought of Domino based webmail. I wouldn't have known until it was mentioned here that it has nothing to do with Domino (which really doesn't matter to me). The bad thing is that it seems to be a use of brand identity (sorta like using "The New Coke" even though the original formula had nothing to do with it :).

  1. 12  Richard Schwartz http://www.poweroftheschwartz.com | 3/24/2010 9:40:13 PM

    I'm just an engineer (and recovering consultant), not a marketing or branding guy, but I do understand that the users of LotusLive iNotes don't (or shouldn't) care about the fact that it is not based on Domino. The problem, as I see it, though, is that the customers who are familiar with on-premises Domino and iNotes (formerly DWA, formerly iNotes Web Access), and who are now considering a full or partial migration to cloud-based mail are faced with an utterly confusing story.

    If these customers want to consider LotusLive as their cloud solution, and they want some portion of their users to keep the functionality that they currently have with on-premises iNotes, then they don't want LotusLive iNotes for those users. They want LotusLive Notes Web, instead. But for the portion of their users who need something less than what they get with on-premises iNotes, they do want Lotus Live iNotes!

    And then, of course, there's iNotes Lite. In the cloud, I guess it's LotusLive Notes Web Lite. But of course that's still distinct from LotusLive iNotes, which doesn't come in a Lite version but is actually an inherently lighter solution than LotusLive Notes Web.

  1. 13  Rod Stauffer  | 3/25/2010 12:49:36 AM

    @12: Well said! Thanks for clearly posting what I failed to convey earlier.

  1. 14  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 3/25/2010 6:50:35 AM

    Branding is the hardest part of marketing.

    Meanwhile, we're building cool stuff and if you want to participate, let me know. :-)

  1. 15  Michael Sobczak http://www.punkdbynotes.com | 3/26/2010 8:39:50 PM

    What would be nice is if Business Partners could offer hosted Sametime. Any chance of that happening?

  1. 16  Gilbert Short  | 3/29/2010 3:49:31 AM

    Could there perhaps be a low end version comparable to google apps standard edition (which includes web hosting) at the same kind of price?