IBM LotusLive wants to Vondle and Tungle you

Please excuse the sex-ay title, but the 13 year old me had to chuckle at it, and with the all the other “LotusLive” posts you are going to see letting us know about the new feature announcements, I figured I’d have some fun with my post.

Yesterday I had the privilege of joining a blogger conference call in which Sean Poulley, Brendan Crotty and Ed Brill went over some new announcements for LotusLive. First off if you couldn’t tell by my rapier wit with the title, LotusLive announced support for Tungle calendaring integration, as well as integration with Vondle Live. Vondle is an online doc viewer that supports over 70 formats and allows you to annotate them from within the browser. So those two integration points were very nice, all configurable from within the admin side of things, and I think will add a lot to the experience.

For those unaware, LotusLive Notes can be had for $5 a month, and can be accessed via the web client, or a Lotus Notes client itself. It allows for a 25GB mailbox as well. In addition, if you want Traveler mobile email support, that will be an additional $2 a user per month. So for a total of $7 a month, you can have a pretty kick ass email solution you can access via web, mobile device or Notes client. Right now the Traveler support only is for iOS devices, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Blackberry support is supposedly coming soon, and I don’t see any mention of Android support yet. I imagine that once the beta of Android is done on the Domino side, that it will make it’s way into LotusLive.

Lotus also announced a new $10 a month offering called the LotusLive Collaboration Suite that includes the LotusLive Notes above as well as IM, file sharing, social networking and web conferencing. It’s a pretty full offering for only $10 a month.

As for the social networking aspect, Lotus added Communities as a feature within LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections. So now you can create community areas to share activities, bookmarks, discussion areas and tags. Which means you’ll see that in the collaboration suite as well. Lastly, LotusLive Notes added 21 additional languages, Engage and Connections added 5 languages and Meetings and iNotes added 7 new languages, while Meetings also added app sharing support for the Mac OS.

So in all, LotusLive continues to grow, expand and integrate. They are being pretty nimble in this space, so I’m excited to see how it is received in the marketplace, and to see how much more they’ll unveil in the months to come. Lotusphere should be very interesting.