Review of LotusLive iNotes

A few days ago we covered IBM’s announcement of iNotes – an email addition to LotusLive.

Judging by the name, iNotes sounds like a web-based replacement for Notes. I went into this review with excitement, but unfortunately the excitement did not last very long. For $3 per month (with just 1GB of storage), I expect much more than a very basic webmail client, which is pretty much all iNotes offers. Moreover, the only thing iNotes shares with Notes is the name and the color theme.

First Impression

My first impression of iNotes is that it loads slow. Loading up the mailbox takes a few seconds (in part because of a few HTTP redirects). Comparing to many other modern services, it does not have that snappy feeling to it.

iNotes does not fully integrate with the rest of the LotusLive suite. It feels like a tag-along product (which it is, as IBM bought it from Outblaze). If iNotes was a product from a start-up it would have been a decent product. But it’s not. iNotes is a product from IBM and it is entirely reasonable to hold them to a higher standard – a standard this product does not meet.

IBM has a huge advantage over most competitors by having an major stake in the enterprise market with all aging on-site Lotus Notes deployment. I think many CIOs and CTOs would very much want to move to the cloud. If IBM provided a solid migration tool to simplify the move, IBM could become a serious SaaS player. Unfortunately this is not the case. iNotes simply does not provide the features required for a company to throw out their existing system.

Mail

The mail client is very simple. It does provide the basic features, but that’s it. The client offers basic AJAX features, such as drag and drop of messages between folders. There is no support multiple email accounts which is a deal breaker for me.

One good thing with iNotes is that they use SSL by default, which provides a bit of extra security.

Apparently email is not important enough for the dashboard.

Contacts

The contact management is very simple. However, it does provide pretty much everything required by an address book. The only major thing that is missing in the contact management is an import/export feature. It would also be nice with a Twitter integration, as found in more modern tools, such as 37signal’s Highrise.

One feature in the Contacts I really like is the contact sharing. I would consider contact sharing a key feature for companies. While the administration of the shared contacts (Corporate directory) is still a bit rough, it is still a whole lot better than ‘contact sharing’ in Google Apps.

Calendar

Similarly to the contact management, the calendar is very simple. It comes with the basic features, but nothing more. For an enterprise calendar, I think it is missing some important features, such as support for time-zones. Another thing missing is import/export of calendar data.

Perhaps a more important missing feature is a shared calendar. While you are able to send ‘invites’ to other users within your company, this is hardly a replacement for a shared calendar. There seems to be support for multiple calendars in the interface, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to manage permissions for a shared calendar.

Administration

The administration of LotusLive and iNotes is very easy. With minimal training, even a person with basic technical skills can administrate it. This is definitely a big plus for iNotes.

As mentioned earlier the integration between iNotes and LotusLive is poor. This becomes clear in the administration interface too. Instead of being a part of the regular administrative interface, the administration of iNotes opens up in a new window.

Technical specs

• 1GB storage per account

The storage space is shared with other LotusLive products.

• IMAP/POP3 (with SSL)

Conclusion

Would I recommend Lotus Live and iNotes as a complete collaboration software for a company? No. It’s not ready yet. The email features are very limited and iNotes does not fully integrate with the rest of the LotusLive-suite. The rest of the LotusLive-suite is really solid which only underscores iNotes’ poor performance.

Another thing that I was surprised to see missing was Over-the-air-Synchronization (OTA). This is a crucial feature today that most companies relies on. I don’t know how IBM could launch iNotes without this support.

Bottom line: IBM, if you want to be considered a serious cloud option, you cannot just buy a webmail and rebrand it as iNotes.