ITPro: News: IBM takes on social networking:
This is an interesting article in the IT Pro magazine. It outlines plans by IBM to introduce a suite of social networking tools for the corporate environment.
It is branded as Lotus Connections is being marketed as social software for business.
It comprises of Profiles -Find the people you need.
Communities -Work with people who share common interests and expertise.
Blogs – Present your own ideas, and learn from others.
Dogear – Save and share bookmarks.
Activities – Organize your work and tap your professional network.
Launched in the US this week, the software is available worldwide and will cost $55 (£28) for a limited package or $110 (£55) for the full package.
There are already lots of organisations out there using social software based on open source and open standards. From my perspective this is a better model to follow then you don’t get locked into one company. Our own Highland leadership site uses social software to allow communication and collaboration for colleagues in Highland who are participating on our leadership programme. It was deliberately constructed around open source software like MySQL, php, Ruby on Rails and Apache.
It will be interesting to see how Lotus Connections takes off. There used to be a saying in the 1980’s “You don’t get fired for buying from big blue” referring to corporate IT departments tendency to always purchase IBM hardware. Well we know what eventually happened to IBM’s hardware sales.
Technorati Tags: IBM, Open Source, social networking, web 2.0
Filed under: Web 2.0
