IBM Lotus Connections is a joke. Needs lots of work still.
I was expecting to see a true competitor last week, when I had a chance to check out the new IBM Lotus Connection, I was very disappointed. I think you will be too.
Last week during the Web 2.0 Expo and this week at the Gartner ITExpo I had the “pleasure” of checking out the latest “Innovation” from IBM Lotus Connections.
What can I say?!
IBM has a lot of work to do before they should ship this Innovative product to their customers. I also think that many of their customers must not understand what is going on and IBM knows it.
In general the product looks good on the outside. The problem is its architecture and the lack of understanding by IBM of the Social Media application on the web.
The system still works in silos and in order to try to use it right you need to buy several products and integrate them together.
Tags work only in the user profile, but they don’t come from your blog posts. There are tags for each group, but again they are not associated with posts, wikis or anything else.
User profiles are searchable, but you can’t filter them down. When I asked about the user profiles and the tags, on of the IBM experts looked and me and asked me why should they do it that way. This means that IBM had not looked at any social networks on the web before they started their Innovative Lotus product design. Tags should be “federated’ in future versions.
Now about the Blog software; Lotus’ blogging engine is based on the Roller (from SUN). You may want to go and get it for FREE and download it since it’s the same. I am not sure why would someone want to pay for roller anyway. All you can do is plain text blog posts and pictures. There is no support for any multimedia like podcasting, video, flash, etc.
The biggest problem with Lotus Connections is the architecture of the product. In companies, there should be open and closed communities, different user level rights. You can’t just blog about everything to everyone. They don’t have it. They may have another product for that, but why is it not here, I am not sure.
One other major problem with IBM Lotus Connections is the lack of analytics. This is a wide spread problem for many social media tools and I think we are trying to address it and have good stats ever right now. When I asked about stats (I heard others ask as well), IBMers were looking around for help. They said that this was coming soon, and the reason they don’t have it is because they “don’t know what statistics should be useful”. Come on, IBM does not know what stats are useful, WOW.
So, in overview, if you are on the market for an Enterprise 2.0 Blogging, Wiki, RSS, and Social Networking platform, you need to compare Blogtronix Enterprise with IBM Lotus Connections, SuiteTwo (for which I will post a blog as well) and MSFT Share Point for sure.
If you don’t compare our award winning platform (RedHerring 100 finalist for North America in 2007) with the new comers (IBM, MSFT, Intel) you will loose. On top of providing an unified suite of Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. Blogtronix provides security and scalability like no other on the market today. We have the only true web 2.0 platform that combines all essential tools like communities, blogs, wikis, RSS (secure RSS), document management, corporate social networking, analytics and corporate compliance on the market today.
Come and test it out, call us for a demo today.
Vassil Mladjov
415.420.2883
Last week during the Web 2.0 Expo and this week at the Gartner ITExpo I had the “pleasure” of checking out the latest “Innovation” from IBM Lotus Connections.
What can I say?!
IBM has a lot of work to do before they should ship this Innovative product to their customers. I also think that many of their customers must not understand what is going on and IBM knows it.
In general the product looks good on the outside. The problem is its architecture and the lack of understanding by IBM of the Social Media application on the web.
The system still works in silos and in order to try to use it right you need to buy several products and integrate them together.
Tags work only in the user profile, but they don’t come from your blog posts. There are tags for each group, but again they are not associated with posts, wikis or anything else.
User profiles are searchable, but you can’t filter them down. When I asked about the user profiles and the tags, on of the IBM experts looked and me and asked me why should they do it that way. This means that IBM had not looked at any social networks on the web before they started their Innovative Lotus product design. Tags should be “federated’ in future versions.
Now about the Blog software; Lotus’ blogging engine is based on the Roller (from SUN). You may want to go and get it for FREE and download it since it’s the same. I am not sure why would someone want to pay for roller anyway. All you can do is plain text blog posts and pictures. There is no support for any multimedia like podcasting, video, flash, etc.
The biggest problem with Lotus Connections is the architecture of the product. In companies, there should be open and closed communities, different user level rights. You can’t just blog about everything to everyone. They don’t have it. They may have another product for that, but why is it not here, I am not sure.
One other major problem with IBM Lotus Connections is the lack of analytics. This is a wide spread problem for many social media tools and I think we are trying to address it and have good stats ever right now. When I asked about stats (I heard others ask as well), IBMers were looking around for help. They said that this was coming soon, and the reason they don’t have it is because they “don’t know what statistics should be useful”. Come on, IBM does not know what stats are useful, WOW.
So, in overview, if you are on the market for an Enterprise 2.0 Blogging, Wiki, RSS, and Social Networking platform, you need to compare Blogtronix Enterprise with IBM Lotus Connections, SuiteTwo (for which I will post a blog as well) and MSFT Share Point for sure.
If you don’t compare our award winning platform (RedHerring 100 finalist for North America in 2007) with the new comers (IBM, MSFT, Intel) you will loose. On top of providing an unified suite of Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. Blogtronix provides security and scalability like no other on the market today. We have the only true web 2.0 platform that combines all essential tools like communities, blogs, wikis, RSS (secure RSS), document management, corporate social networking, analytics and corporate compliance on the market today.
Come and test it out, call us for a demo today.
Vassil Mladjov
415.420.2883
3 comments:
Always good to see a nice unbiased review... LOL
And moderated comments, even better!
Sorry,
I just turned off the moderation. Old setting :)
v
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