IBM adds Notes capabilities to LotusLive

IBM has upgraded its Lotuslive with additional features such as revamped emails,messaging, calendars, instant messaging and contacts. It has got an interesting set of collaboration tools which called as communities.

Communities is one of the major additions to lotuslive. Communities closely resembles with IBM's social networking software Connections, though it does not include the ability to create blogs and wikis.Anyways, Commuinities are usefull in cross-organization collabartions. Using this users can interact via discussion forums,project tracking tools ,bookmarks, filesharing and information tagging.

Users can deploy either a Web edition or thick-client software. Previously, LotusLive had offered Web-based e-mail for $3 per user per month, but the new messaging/calendaring service starts at $5 per user per month. In the new plan, each user is allotted 25 gigabytes of storage.

Coming to Lotus notes, there is no support for lotus notes provided yet But the service can be integrated with an enterprise's in-house Lotus Notes deployment, using internal LotusLive capabilities and IBM's Tivoli Directory Integrator.

IBM has integrated LotusLive with Tungle's scheduling and calendar applications allowing LotusLive users to schedule meetings across different calendaring applications and with Bricsys' software  for sharing, viewing and annotating documents, with support for more than 70 document types.