Zimbra vs Lotus Notes

What this deal means? For Yahoo - it's the end of the Enterprise game. The company will focuse on its consumer portal and will not interfere with its new strategical partner - Microsoft (because Zimbra - is MS Exchange competitor). For VMWare - this is another huge step to the elite of Cloud Computing market. WMWare is the largest developer of virtualization systems, that are used in public and private cloud platforms. In addition, the company has recently bought Springsource to create its own web platform - an alternative to Google App Engine. The most popular open-source collaboration suite Zimbra will let VMWare to enter the Web-applications market. There’s no word on the sale price yet, but it's probably lower than the $350 million paid by Yahoo in 2006.

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.