GMail vs Lotus Notes

This year, marketers in Enterprise 2.0 companies haven't prepared  well for the April Fools' Day, perhaps because it fell on Sunday. The only diligent company was Google, that released several April 1 products. One of them - is GMail Tap - the new app for mobile GMail, which allows to quickly type text with just two buttons - dot and dash (watch video above). At the same time Microsoft, which recently was very productive in funny videos, at that time only unveiled the new interface for the online file storage and sharing service SkyDrive - SkyCMD. It allows you to manage your files using the classic DOS-syntax and the command line:

Usually the companies that develop and sell intranet portals, position them as an alternative to the Email. They say that instead of endless mailing back and forth, your users can now work with data in one place. But with Google - it's another story. Google wants companies to use Google+ as a social intranet solution and continue using GMail. So that's why both solutions have been closely integrated. In GMail you now can filter messages by Google+ circles. So, if you create a Google+ circle for a workgroup, you can view all emails related to this workgroup separately. In the right column near the message you now can see the latest post of this contact in Google+. In addition, contacts in GMail will be updated, if your co-worker updates his profile in Google+. Thus, your address book will be always relevant.

The confusing situation with mobile platforms is getting more and more clear day by day. The weaker devices, platforms, intermediate platforms are heading to the deadpool. Today, Adobe announced that it stops the development of Flash for mobile devices. As you know, the mobile Flash was actually killed by Steve Jobs, when he banned it on iOS. After that, Microsoft also didn't support Flash on Windows Phone. And although it later appeared on some Android-devices and Blackberry Playbook, it wasn't clever for Adobe to continue developing this not-so-crossplatform technology. Instead of Flash the company will focus on HTML5-app building tools. As we have suggested, HTML5 can become the "new flash" for Adobe.

As you know, earlier GMail, Google Calendar and Google Docs supported offline mode in all browsers using Google Gears plug-in. But then Google decided to bet on HTML5 and abandoned its own proprietary plug-in. The Gears was quickly removed from the Chrome browser (in Firefox and IE it still works). And today Google developers were happy to announce that the offline mode for these apps in Chrome is back and it is implemented on HTML5. However, for an average user it will look no better than it was before: for offline access you still need to install an app (from the Chrome Web Store). In addition, the interface of the offline app is different from the usual web-based GMail interface. It looks lie GMail for iPad.

What Google needs to do to entice users from Outlook to GMail? For example, make GMail look like Outlook. Now it's possible. You can add the Preview pane to your GMail inbox, placing it in the third vertical column (like at the screenshot) or under the messages list. The feature can be turned on in the GMail Labs. But between the left nav sidebar, the list of messages, the message itself, and then the right sidebar - which includes the new People Widget and ads - there’s a lot going on in the inbox.

VoIP-service in GMail, which was earlier available only in the U.S. and Canada, has appeared in the user accounts in almost all countries of the world - in 38 languages. Here is the list of countries where Gmail Call Phone is NOT currently available: Argentina, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran , Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Viet Nam. With this global intervention, Google has lowered its VoIP rates, making them slightly cheaper than rates of its new main rival - Skype. For example, a call to France costs 8 cents (vs. 16.9 cents in Skype), to USA - 1 (vs. 1.9). As before GMail Call Phone requires quick browser plug-in installation - the same plug-in that is used for video calling in GMail.

Remember how Mark Benioff laughed at Microsoft's anti-advertising campaign? It turns out that Microsoft also can do similar things. A few days ago Google launched the advertising campaign that encourages users to switch from draconian email systems and their “embarrassingly outdated addresses” over to GMail, which features such niceties as free phone calls and video chat. For this campaign the video (see above) was created. You can see the red link to this video in your GMail-account. But Microsoft, whose Hotmail service is obviously one of the targets of Google's campaign, isn’t keeping quiet. Today another video hit the Web:

Companies like IBM and Microsoft love to confuse their customers with numerous services and titles. Not so long ago IBM launched the new mail service LotusLive iNotes, that costs $3 per month per user and provides corporate e-mail, contacts and calendar. And today IBM has unveiled another service called LotusLive Notes, that costs $5 per month and also includes e-mail, contacts and calendar. At first glance, the only difference is the price, but in fact the latest service is a multitenant SaaS version of Lotus Domino (Domino - is the name of server software in the traditional in-house Lotus Notes system). How it differs from LotusLive iNotes?

Email was the first collaboration tool in the Intarnet. Then intranet portals emerged, and they wanted to kill Email because of its lacks: instead of sending back and forth messages and documents, they are placed on a portal web-page (for example, in the news, on the forum or file cabinet). But due to the fact that people got used to e-mail and email was also used for external communications - intranet portals failed to replace the Email as a primary workspace. Moreover, recently Email launched the counterattack. And it happened because the major enterprise Email-solutions (GMail, Outlook, Lotus Notes) have become the platforms that allow third-party developers to add new functionality.

The world's most popular enterprise Email client, MS Outlook, is already equipped with various Enterprise 2.0 tools. Outlook is already integrated with social networks (Xobni and Outlook Social Connector), Google Apps, Google Docs (Harmony), Remember the Milk, etc. Now, when this place is crowded, the developers switched their attention to the second most popular enterprise Email client - Lotus Notes. Thus, the new plug-in + service Gist makes the same for Lotus Notes as Xobni for Outlook - allows you to see the social profiles of those with whom you communicate. Gist pulls the latest information about a person from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as recent news about his company from blogs and news sites. In addition, the plug-in displays in suitable form all correspondence with selected contact and files sent to/from him. It should be noted that Gist also works with Outlook, GMail, iPhone and may also be accessed as a web service.

When Google Apps Marketplace launched, we noticed that Google's partner Salesforce hadn't joined this ecosystem. Now it's clear why. Salesforce is building its own ecosystem of collaborative applications around Chatter. Although Chatter (Facebook for enterprise) is nothing like Google Apps (email + docs), however the aim of both tools is the same - collaboration. At the ChatterExchange presentation, Marc Benioff has clearly stated that Chatter will compete with MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes (he modestly omitted Google Apps). "Don't be confused that these systems have little in common" - said Benioff, - "the fact that Sharepoint and Lotus Notes were created back in these days when people didn't use Twitter and Facebook and when the top collaborative technologies were email and shared folders".

The geek-developer dream comes true: a full-on collaboration environment with an open API and a name right out of Star Trek. Today at the Lotushpere conference IBM unveiled Project Vulcan - the new cloud platform for collaboration and social tools, that is already compared to Google Wave. But unlike Google Wave, Vulcan - is not a separate application, but an integrated environment for all future and existing Lotus apps, including Lotus Notes and LotusLive. Vulcan will be available to developers in the second half of 2010, and meanwhile it will be available to LotusLive Labs team, which has already shown 4 new projects for LotusLive:

From today IBM starts providing Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging - the hosting service for the popular email and collaboration software. I.e. IBM will host Lotus Domino in its data center and users will access it either through the web interface Domino Web Access, or via a mobile client Lotus Notes Traveler, or in the standard desktop client Lotus Notes.  And IBM will outsource support, virus and spam filter. According to IBM, service is not a classic SaaS solution based on multitenant architecture. For each client the dedicated Domino server will be maintained. The cost of using Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging - is $10 per user per month.

The new version of IBM's collaborative software Lotus Notes 8.0 includes a free office suite for editing documents called Lotus Symphony. It includes a word processor, spreadsheets and presentations editor. As well as the new version of Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony applications are built on the Eclipse platform and support ODF format (Open Document Format for XML) - it's an open non-proprietary standard, which is an alternative to Microsoft's Open XML. Lotus Symphony will compete not only with MS Office, but also with online Google Docs. In addition to the office suite, the new version of Lotus Notes features a new modern interface in the Web 2.0 style and a lot of new options for managing mail, calendars and contacts.