I have been hearing quite a bit of buzz on the collaboration front this week. Zoho (disclaimer: Zoho is the sole sponsor of this blog but this is my independent opinion) announced Zoho Office for Sharepoint and Mindtouch is trying to shake the world by breaking the data silos inside the intranet with their Mindtouch Intranet Solutions. Collaboration is in the air this week.
Not to be outdone by other players in the marketplace, IBM started offering Lotus Live (previous Cloud Ave coverage here), voted as the winner of The Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Computing Technology Buyers’ Choice Award by the Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees including, probably, our own Ben who is in the audience. LotusLive is their collaborative environment that let you share documents, meet easily with potential customers and build your network by connecting with companies relevant to your business needs. In short, LotusLive helps companies work outside their firewall.
IBM’s LotusLive offering has been at the nexus of Cloud Computing with Social Networking technologies. Yesterday, they announced the release of LotusLive connections, that helps companies of all sizes the ability to build, share information and easily work with their extended business network over the Web. This is an extension of IBM’s enterprise level social software offering called Lotus Connectons and targeted towards individual professionals and small & medium businesses. It runs complimentary to the other LotusLive component called LotusLive Engage.
LotusLive Connections simplifies working together, making it easy to identify and work with experts from any company online with the flexibility, convenience and affordable pricing associated with multi-tenant cloud services. Instant messaging, file sharing and activities are all instantly accessible for use with LotusLive networks.
It is pretty interesting to see IBM trying to compete in this space along with the likes of Google and other smaller players. This product will be available by the end of this month.
