LotusLive iNotes – my initial impressions (signing up)

We’ll it’s been an interesting morning signing up with LotusLive iNotes – here’s the process one needs to follow, and my initial thoughts…

First off, click through from the LotusLive iNotes page, requesting a trial:

Then fill in the form:

(at this stage the email address must not be an existing LotusLive account – if you already have an account, then contact LotusLive support to get iNotes added to your subscription)

This is confirmed, telling the user to expect a confirmation email:

The email arrives in less than a minute, asking for the account to be confirmed:

Clicking through asks the user (now an iNotes administrator) to set a password and confirm the Ts&Cs:

The user is then returned to a log in prompt and can gain access to their iNotes administration panel:

The admin panel allows the administrator to add additional users, change the company identity, and set contact details etc.  The first step the administrator really needs to complete is to provision their own email account, via the User Accounts view:

Clicking on the name yields:

The User checkbox needs to be enabled, and the options set for this user:

This makes the user a pending mail user:

The administrator then logs out and logs back in again, to be offered another agreement to sign (for user access this time):

Finally, having agreed, we have access to our Inbox:

From this point on, logging in as this user will give access directly to the Inbox, with the Administration link (top-right) yielding the account settings.  

I’ll cover my views on the application itself in a separate post.  However, for now I have to say that the signing up process is relatively painless – no credit card details required, just one email confirmation, limited personal/organisation details required and so on.  The UI is pretty and performance is good (as you would expect for a newly-launched service).  The process could definitely be more intuitive – for instance, there is no advice given to the administrator as to how to set up their own email, nor what options are available regarding changing of email addresses. Personally (having signed up for GAPE, BPOS etc in the past), I would prefer it if an Inbox was automatically provisioned for the administrator to shorten this process somewhat.

Overall though, this seems a good start – sign up for your own LotusLive iNotes account now…