LotusLive iNotes vs GMail

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.

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: