IBM makes big online collaboration move with LotusLive Engage

IBM is making a big move into the online collaboration market with a new product called LotusLive Engage, which it will be demonstrating tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Engage appears to be the most comprehensive service yet offered under IBM’s LotusLive umbrella of web-based businesses services. The heart of the product appears to be a web meeting service, but just as Cisco says it wants to build a collaboration suite around its WebEx meeting service, IBM says Engage is “not a new meeting service, just a smarter one,” and that it “extends your online meeting experience by bringing together the essential collaboration tools you need before, during and after your meeting” — basically, it adds things like business social networking and project management on top of the meeting service.

You can read more details at the Engage site, but here’s a quick breakdown of features:

• A standard web meeting service, complete with desktop sharing, recording, and security
• A professional network of contacts with whom you can collaborate using the other Engage features
• Online file storage and sharing
• Project tracking, to-do lists, and brainstorming
• Form and chart creation tools
• Instant messaging, including photo- and file-sharing

None of this sounds particularly groundbreaking, but putting all of these features together in one place could be pretty compelling. Oh, and there are already 30,000 users in Engage’s beta testing program. The product will be available for everyone on April 7, with pricing from $10 to $45 per user per month.

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