Earlier this week, the LotusLive home page received a face-lift, making it easier for visitors to understand the services of the LotusLive family. The new compare services page breaks down the services into components so that you can see what you get with each of them.
Later today, you’ll be able to sign up for a 30-day trial of the newest offering, LotusLive Connections. This service was announced at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference (the setting for Microsoft’s drubbing at the hands of Lotus Connections 2.0 last year). To quote the press release “as part of the unveiling, LotusLive was voted the winner of The Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Computing Technology Buyers’ Choice Award. IBM’s cloud services won in a side-by-side comparison with Google Apps, EMC and other vendors’ cloud technologies, as voted by the Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees”.
To summarise, the main difference between LotusLive Engage and Connections is the omission of web conferences, forms and charts. However, the good news is that the stream-lined set of core capabilities will be available at a lower cost than that of Engage. So many businesses are interested in the possibilities of enterprise-grade social collaboration – we have already provided this in the form of IBM Lotus Connections (available to deploy on-premise), but the LotusLive offering provides an easy way to get started with minimal investment and to start collaborating with your extended enterprise and external contacts.
