Wednesday, November 18, 2009

What are the minimum number of users needed for LotusLive?

I've encountered a few instances recently where people were under the impression that all LotusLive offerings have a high minimum user requirement that makes them prohibitive for smaller businesses.  This is not the case.  There are several different services offerings available from LotusLive:
  • Meetings (previously Sametime Unyte)
  • Events
  • Connections
  • Engage
  • iNotes
  • Notes
Of the above offerings, only LotusLive Notes has a minimum user requirement, and this is because this service provides a dedicated hosting Domino environment for the customer.

All of the other services can be subscribed to in whatever number of seats a customer chooses.  For a small company, you can get a rich email and collaboration environment for $18 a user/month (iNotes + Engage), with practically no operational or IT costs, and an immediate ability to deploy.  You can learn more about these offerings or sign up for a trial at: http://www.lotuslive.com

5 comments:

  1. Phil,

    If LotusLive Notes is on a dedicated Domino server then what is the difference between that and offerings from any Domino hosting company like Prominic.NET? It is the same stuff with a new name "cloud computing."

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  2. Interestingly, the one you mention, hosted Notes, is the only product that cannot be provisioned and is not strictly a web interface.

    Disclaimer: AS one of Lotus' largest hosting providers, we have no minimum requirement for the number of users in hosting Notes itself.

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  3. Gee Phil... if I was complaining about a 200 seat minimum and there's only one product that has that restriction, then which product do you think I was talking about?

    Saying that there are other LotusLive offerings without the 200 minimum is a bit pointless if they don't give the same service as the product that the customers want.
    .

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  4. @Richard, I want to say that at a high level, there is no difference. In fact, LotusLive Notes was originally called Lotus Hosted Messaging. As far as I can figure, the lingo "private cloud" is nothing more than traditional hosting from a provider. That said, the devil is in the details. When comparing hosted Domino offerings, there are a number of things to consider, such as:

    * What SLA will be provided?
    * What level of access will we have to the system?
    * What responsibilities for managing Domino are ours, and what will be provided by the hosting/managed services provider?
    * Will we own the hardware, or will that be provided?
    * Do we purchase licenses separately, or is the software price built in to the hosting fee?

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  5. @Graham, I have had several encounters the past couple of months where folks have stated "LotusLive" has too high of a minimum user requirement to be useful for small businesses. Your recent blog post was just one.

    There are several LotusLive offerings, and my experience does not match yours when you imply that LotusLive Notes is the only offering that provides "the same service as the product that customers want." If what you find are customers with fewer than 1000 users wanting hosted Notes and Domino, there are a number of business partners that provide this service (See Richard and Chris' posts above).

    Now, if your point is that the LotusLive iNotes offering is not feature-rich enough to be attractive to small businesses, well that's a discussion to dig into. Why? What features do you find it lacks that IBM should add?

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