Yellow-X-Pres

Today IBM made a series of announcements that have a major impact on the future of the Lotus Notes client. 
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The first was the announcement that Lotus Notes 8.5.2 will be available from  August 24.  As a member of the Lotus Notes Managed beta program I have been using 8.5.2 pretty much exclusively for the past four months.  It is just that good!  There has been extensive coverage of the many new features being added with 8.5.2 I probably don't need to cover them here.  What does it mean to have yet another Notes client upgrade to plan?  Well, if you and your organization have not already migrated to 8.5.1 it should be your objective to help make that happen sooner rather than later.  Bypassing 8.5.1 and going straight to 8.5.2 seems to make the most sense to me.  The incremental value of migrating from 8.5.1 to 8.5.2 is going to vary from organization to organization.  8.5.2 has a lot of great features, performance improvements, and many bugs from 8.5.1 (and before) that have been addressed.

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Today's second announcement is of much more strategic importance to the future of the Notes client.  IBM today announced that on August 24 our little baby is growing up and moving to the cloud.  On that date LotusLive Notes will become available to the general public.  Made available as part of LotusLive 1.3, companies interested in migrating all or part of their collaboration and social networking infrastructure to the cloud using the SaaS model, will now have the ability to utilize the power of the Lotus Notes client as an interface to that offering.

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With earlier releases of LotusLive, IBM had already negated most of the market advantages that Google might have tried to gain with its Google Apps offering.  LotusLive iNotes already offers cloud based mail, contacts, and calendaring with 25GB storage, IMAP and POP support, spam and virus protection all for the very attractive price of $3 per month per user, with a minimum purchase of a single user license.  With today's announcement it is now possible for companies to move these same in-house services to the cloud but still retain the advantages of using the Lotus Notes client for an equally impressive $5 per month per user (25 user minimum).  Sorry, no steak knives, but it also includes the instant messaging capabilities provided by the integrated SameTime client.  IBM also announced that LotusLive Notes would provide full integration with existing LotusLive features.  A new bundle of LotusLive Notes and LotusLive Engage for $10 per month per user (again, 25 user minimum) will extend the LotusLive Notes capabilities with Web conferencing, Files, Activities, Forms, and Charts.

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What wasn't formally announced today, but included as part of a blogger briefing was some insights into some of the announcements likely to be made between now and LotusSphere that will further fill out the LotusLive Notes offering.  These include:-

1. A future bundling of LotusLive Notes which will add an enterprise CAL for Lotus Notes to the existing bundles for an extra $1 per month per user.  This will allow users with an existing Enterprise CAL to migrate to LotusLive and still retain the ability to access on-premise Notes applications for a very attractive price.
2. LotusLive Notes capabilities for mobile devices will be enhanced first with the offering of Lotus Notes Traveler (for an additional charge).
3. Look for a joint announcement later in the year by IBM and RIM on the availability of BES as part of LotusLive.
4. Also look for announcements in the next few months for additional languages to be supported, and enhancements to busy time and shared calendar management.
5. IBM has already started to talk about Project Concord and we should expect likely announcements of a technology preview becoming available.
6. It has already been announced that the latest beta for Symphony 3.0 includes LotusLive plug-ins.  I would expect this product should become available during this same timeframe.
7. A hybrid model for LotusLive is also likely to become available soon.  This will allow organizations the flexibility to deploy parts of their organization onto the cloud while still retaining some parts on-premise.  This is consistent with the overall Lotus offering of providing choice to organizations something I think gives Lotus a significant advantage over its competitors offerings of "one size fit all" or "its my way or the highway".  And the migration to LotusLive will be as easy as existing Lotus Notes replication/routing.
   

Perhaps the one major hole in this initial Notes client offering for SaaS is Notes/Domino applications?  IBM's answer to this was that it was not looking to provide these types of services as part of its core LotusLive offering.  Rather it was looking towards a number of its key Business Partners to provide these services.  This was not news for me, as over the past few weeks since joining GROUP, I have been learning that GROUP is one of those partners working very closely with IBM to make this happen via its GROUP Live offering.  And while I can't say much just yet about what Nathan, Tim, Colin, Keith, and I are working on, I (think I) can say you can also be looking towards GROUP to make some pretty exciting announcements in this space between now and LotusSphere.  What I have been learning these past few weeks is that GROUP believe that "the impossible" just take a little longer... and for them a little longer means a few months!

 

So today's announcement of  the Lotus Notes client joining the LotusLive family is just the first of many important steps that will be taken this year and beyond.  Having nurtured its development over the past 20 years the Notes client is getting ready to leave it on-premise home and set up a new home in the clouds.  And that is just the start of a much larger journey that may see it reach even further when we begin to see the vision outlined in Project Vulcan appear in future announcements at LotusSphere and beyond.  Man, I am really starting to like the way Lotus Notes has grown up and matured as a potential future quarterback of a championship winning collaboration team.  How about you?