Nah – I just made that up – the Lotus Live in question here is IBM’s offering to compete with GotoMeeting and other online products. I recently spent a morning with IBM and Teamsolutionz ( a Northern Ireland based IBM Business partner ) looking at the virtues of IBM’s cloud based products and specifically the LotusLive Engage offering. These services are web based subscriptions that allow you to arrange meetings – work collaboratively with others (in my case with varied clients and on multiple projects).
So you might say – I can get all of this from companies at the moment – and can even get some of them free. Yes I’d say you could but the combination of what IBM are offering in one location is actually probably the best combination I’ve seen and its priced well for small businesses. After the demo I signed up to the 30 day trial and after getting the registrations sorted – kicked off my first trial meeting within 15 minutes. You can access the trial here www.lotuslive.com and show very quickly if this is the tool for you.
For me the combination of meetings – activities and file management were enough of a spur to get started. The ability to bring in guests i.e other people who are not LotusLive subscribers is a clincher since in most of my work with small businesses it would take at least a demonstration of the tools capabilities over a longer period to get them persuaded to adopt this type of service internally.
So far I’ve used this for a quick meeting and some project management capabilities but really see a role for this among clients who could save time and money travelling to meetings where this could be used to bolster face to face meeting which we know are best for networking. So more about that when I have had the opportunity to further test and stress the application. But so far – so good.