GroupWise vs LotusLive iNotes

Novell was formerly #3 after Microsoft and IBM on the enterprise collaboration market (with its email system Novell GroupWise). When intranet solutions became popular, the company unveiled with some delay Novell Teaming, which it positioned as a Sharepoint  alternative. But this system hasn't become very popular. So now Novell hurry to be among the first vendors to provide modern enterprise social systems with real-time capabilities. The new Novell hope is Novell Pulse, that looks very similar to Google Wave and also is able to work with this Google product. Novell Pulse - is a unique tool, as it provides a combination of microblogging, social networking and next generation real-time messaging.

Novell has introduced a new version of its messaging and collaboration system Novell GroupWise 5.2. As the main competitors (Lotus Notes and MS Exchange) Novell GroupWise deploys the open Internet-standards IMAP4, SMTP / MIME, POP3 and LDAP, so that customers could use the system in combination with other email clients and collaboration applications. Also, Novell has released a gateway, which enables to use the Microsoft Mail client to work with GroupWise server (as you know, this client is included by default in Windows). In addition, Novell GroupWise 5.2 added full support for Java applets, which allows you to access the system through any Internet browser.

This week, the research firm Arthur Andersen has published a study according to which the most effective tool for intranet collaboration is e-mail. According to the report, 90% of office workers use Email on average 23 times a week. The second position is taken by scheduling tools, then go corporate forums, workflow and task management solutions. This fact is also confirms the "big three" vendors of intranet collaboration systems: Microsoft (Exchange), IBM (Lotus Notes) and Novell (GroupWise). All these products include calendars, tasks and shared database. Nevertheless, all these systems are associated by users primarily as enterprise email solutions. The main reason for this phenomenon (according to the "big three" executives) is e-mail simplicity.

Today at the Demo-1996 Conference, Novell introduced GroupWise WebAccess - the module, which enables users to access their universal inlbox in GroupWise through any Internet browser. The server supports Unix, Windows NT and OS / 2 and requires Web-server installation. The web client license cost starts from $ 249. Currently, Novell GroupWise - is the main competitor of IBM Lotus Notes in the enterprise groupware market.

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?

IBM has signed a contract with Panasonic, according to which 300000 company employees will use the LotusLive SaaS services (email, calendar, web-conferencing, messenger, file storage). Neither Google, nor Salesforce have no deployments of such  scale. Sure, this deal will warm the SaaS market and strengthen the trust in SaaS scheme. Especially, taking into account the fact that Panasonic moves to SaaS system from Microsoft Exchange. Though we were not impressed with LotusLive and email service LotusLive iNotes, but the Japanese giant considered it a better option than Exchange and Google Apps. Apparently, the decisive factors were the price (LotusLive costs from $ 3 per user per month) and IBM brand.

When early this year IBM released their new SaaS platform, LotusLive, they promised to add Email to its suite. Today this promise is realized: the brand new SaaS email service LotusLive iNotes is available for business-users. IBM pushes it as a new alternative to Google Apps. Why Google Apps, but not GMail? Because, except the email tools, iNotes contains calendar and contact manager. IBM reps say that Google can't understand the difference between consumer web-services and business apps, and IBM has a vast experience in creating and supporting complex enterprise systems. So, it's just a question of time, when iNotes will drive away Google Apps users, moreover it costs only $36/user/year against Google's $50.