Lotus Connections

IBM/Lotus app/service for Social Networking in the Enterprise/Intranet. (WorkGraph)

http://www.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/connectionshome

Available mid-2007?

Pricing? Hosting/ASP option?

• wouldn't it be interesting if IBM hosted this, extending their internal use, as a way to be a Network Economy EcoSystem?

Integrating theme of pieces: Tagsonomy.

Laurie Flynn article

Steve Hamm article

• The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries. "The business market is showing a lot of interest in using social networking tools to improve productivity. It's about helping people find experts and the information they need to get their jobs done," says SteveMills, the general manager of the software group at IBM.

• At IBM's annual Lotusphere user conference on Jan. 22, the company announced several products, including the public beta test version of its next update for its Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration software, which will go on sale in the first half of the year; and a new package, called Lotus Quickr, which provides software connectors to link popular desktop applications including MsOffice to blogs, wikis, and other social networking programs.

Ted Stanton post with video of announcement/demo.

"Activities" - To-Do List?

• invite and share your tasks with others... manage to-dos that you and your team have

• Ted Stanton gives an example: I created an Activity to help develop the project plan and invited all relevant resources. I then asked some questions via assigning tasks. Then everyone could see the response and share documents. In the first day, I had multiple people posting migration documents, existing project plans, and migration presentations. IBM'ers that had never communicated before were now part of one activity and reviewing each other's documents. As the Activity owner, I can assign task and move documents around in a outline view.

• In the past, formal Work-Flow systems and technologies like EMail and Instant Messaging have been very separate. But we are now finding ways to integrate informal communications into formal workflows. That's what our "Activities" work is all about. We know that people trying to do something will collaborate with others not just across email, but also via instant messages and shared documents. So we invented in Activity Explorer a simple way to connect up a lot of different media types and share them in something similar to an email thread, but that captures all the related information. This gives users a way of organizing their ad-hoc, informal collaborations. It turns out that the underlying data structure for representing this also lends itself to representing formal workflows. So now we could have formal workflows and informal activities supported by the same technology and interwoven. This means a user could follow a formal workflow to the point where some AdHoc interactions were required, then seek exchanges with others via the most appropriate tool - and this would get linked into the workflow.

• An activity is the collection of materials, communications, and processes that emerge when people work together... Basically what you can do with the Activities Dash Board is post links to things that you're working with. You don't actually need to visit the dashboard to do this, because the service integrates easily with a wide range of applications and tools. For example, while you're in your browser, you can click a bookmarklet to post the page you're currently looking at, into the Activity server. It's a similar story from your Notes client or Word, or other places. This works because we use very lightweight integration methods. Data flows in and out over standard protocols/markups, with the most important ones being Atom Standards and the Atom Publishing Protocol. Basically this means that you can post anything that has a URI associated with it - which means just about anything these days. You can extend it to work with your tools, not just the ones we thought of.