As of last Sunday we have a new release inside LotusLive Engage. A release that both Erik and Stuart have been testing as LotusLive Design Partners for a couple of weeks.
To make clear what has changed, we have used the functionality inside LotusLive Charts which creates different charts based on data/spreadsheet:
Communities
As you can see from the graphs, most of the big changes have taken place in Communities, where new functionality has been added from the on-premise version of IBM Connections.
Changes are
– Ability to add Sub-communities (one-level deep)
– Not only adding files but also adding folders to communities
– Adding (guest) users to communities from within the community (even with CSV input file)
– Forum, adding several forums discussions to one community, and move Topics from one Forum to a different discussion if the discussion should take place there.
In my opinion these changes help to make LotusLive Engage the most integrated Social Collaboration solution out there on a SaaS platform. And with the guest feature it is for free for most users also.
Change represented in TagCloud
Here’s the new view:
Administration
We also have seen good changes for the LotusLive company administrators:
– Ability for administrators to create and enable announcements on the home screen
– Addition of a new role “User Account Assistant”
– Directory Options have been extended so that the administrator has the possibility to make profile info of (individual) user visible or not.
Dashboard
Changes in the dashboard are primarily UI changes, meaning less clicks for the end user. There is now a clear difference between LotusLive Apps and Integrated Apps from 3parties.
Files
Inside the file section we have seen mostly UI changes. Collections become Folders, and now you need less clicks to do the job (again this is from IBM Connections). Beside UI changes we see that share folders/files externally has got more attention.
IM
The back-end has moved to Sametime 8.5. This is very good news given the extra features we have in Sametime 8.5.
Meeting
The full functionality inside LL Meetings has now become available inside LotusLive Engage Meetings. This means Audiocast and Record functionality has become available inside LotusLive Engage. Very good news ! This means you can record the whole presentation (including audio via conference call number) in a .wmv or .mov file
There is also an extra security option before you start a meeting, see description below:
Integrated Apps
A new integrated App has been introduced, Teampoint.
Performance
Just before this Spring release we also received significant increases in performance, see also the LotusLive Wiki for more information.
In summary, this is a substantial upgrade of most of the features within LotusLive Engage. Impressive.
