IBM Taps Cloud to Deliver LotusLive E-Mail and Collaboration Suite

by Andrew Garcia

From the LotusLive dashboard, I could easily access my mail, communities, files and activities. I also was immediately shown my personal meeting room information, making it simple to start or invite others to a conference or to join another conference.

Conference moderators can create a list of poll questions to ask attendees during the presentation. I could craft my own questions and a check-box list of possible answers, then choose when to conduct each poll.

Conference presenters can share and mark up Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents. These documents can be added to the conference from the PC or from the LotusLive file storage.

The conference presenter can share their desktop—either the entire screen or an individual application.

The conference presenter can share video from his or her desktop Webcam, but there is no in-line audio. All conference audio must be scheduled and provided separately from LotusLive, unless using the Skype app plug-in.

The in-conference chat client is pretty limited. I could share files through it, but conversations arent threaded, and each message needs to be addressed separately.

The LotusLive collaboration suite lets users create and organize communities around a topic or body of knowledge, inviting like-minded individuals to participate and share relevant documents or links.

For unsupported browsers, users can get at their LotusLive mail and calendar through the scaled-down Ultralight interface. E-mail worked adequately, while the calendar is read-only.