JerryGlover.com - On Domino, the Internet, and other things - Category : Connections

"Suite!" say enterprise CIOs about social software.

Jerry Glover — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:30:23 -0400

Via Nick Carr, Mike Gotta and others comes news of a new Forrester report on Web 2.0 that reveals 61% of 119 CIOs surveyed would prefer a suite of social software solutions from an established enterprise software vendor rather than a piecemeal approach using single function Web 2.0 technology from startups.

This is a strong validation of IBM's strategy with the upcoming Lotus Connections social software suite. Lotus Connections provides blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and activities in an integrated platform, any single piece of which could be used separately but are even more valuable when used in concert. Couple those tools with Sametime awareness and instant messaging and you have a superior toolset for leveraging newly discovered resources and knowledge immediately.

One small issue for IBM is that one of the surveyed technologies — wikis &mdash: is not part of Connections, although they are part of Lotus Quickr.

Lotus Connections video on YouTube

Jerry Glover — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 10:17:48 -0400

Via Adam Gartenberg and Ted Stanton a promotional video for IBM's new Lotus Connections social software suite. Lots of good points in the video - touches on finding knowledge and expertise within the organization, linking those with similar ideas and fostering brainstorming as well as employee mentoring and increasing organizational cohesiveness (tagging personal interests).

Pretty good effort. The one complaint (there has to be one off the top of my head is the comment by one of the characters that they have "300,000 employees around the world"; the line could have just been "we have employees around the world" without using a number and risking the implication that you have to be a huge Fortune 1000 organization to benefit from the product. Plenty of SMB organizations depending on their industry and geographic distribution will find incredible value in Connections.

Anyway, watch and learn and good job IBM.