A thought on the Lotus.com homepage
Tags :Rant
On the Lotus.com homepage, they recently had an article on Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing in enterprises. Here is the area that caught my eye right away:
Making conferencing easier to outsource or bring in-house
"Traditionally, companies have gotten their first taste of conferencing by purchasing a hosted service," says McLellan. "We responded last year by introducing hosted Lotus Web Conferencing through IBM Global Services, enabling companies to pay for conferencing on a monthly basis instead of, or in addition to, implementing Web Conferencing internally."However, more-established Web conferencing adopters are now looking to bring conferencing in-house. "Typically it's a case where different departments are using different service providers, then IT reviews the collection of bills and realizes that it's cheaper to consolidate and operate these IM services internally," says McLellan.
We have been doing this for some time and see that the ease at which this article makes it sound is just not that. Due to firewalls and some lacking abilities inside of the web conferencing, the drive for enterprises to use it has not been as large as one would imagine from the article. Has anyone outsourced the conferencing services and utilized Sametime? I refer to this in terms of someone using only web conferencing through Sametime and outsourced, not just chat services.
I have found that some offerings from the other web conferencing services cannot be matched if only comparing the apples to apples piece. Of course their comment on adding IM ability is valid, but it is a reverse scenario. While Lotus hurries to catch up in the true broadcast conferencing, the other vendors play catch-up in the IM integration with the service.
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On Monday, August 4th, 2003 by Chris Miller
