Lotus touts role of blogs, wikis and feeds
By John Fontana, Network World, 01/30/06
ORLANDO - IBM/Lotus plans to expand its corporate collaboration tools by adding social relationship, behavior mapping and
alerting technology that lets users easily share ideas, data, research and corporate knowledge.
Customers are hoping that the tools can help revolutionize the way their organizations communicate, share data, and analyze
information and work patterns. The goal is to help improve collaboration.
At its annual Lotusphere conference last week, IBM/Lotus showed off plans to infuse its entire collaborative software lineup
with social networking technology such as blogs, wikis and syndication feeds. While those tools are changing the face of the
Internet, Lotus is adapting the concepts and features for internal corporate use in much the same way instant messaging was
adapted for real-time communication.
IBM/Lotus is developing a number of social networking plug-ins to enhance its IM program, Sametime 7.5 (expected to ship midyear),
so users can track down experts, conduct polls, create instant discussion forums and build searchable question-and-answer
archives. The release date of the plug-ins has not been set.
The plug-ins, however, are just the first efforts of a plan to build components and hosted services that will plug social
network capabilities into the core of not only Sametime but also Notes Hannover/Domino Next and WebSphere Portal 6.0. The
company is using its Workplace Managed Client technology, which is common across those three platforms, to ensure those components
work in all three products.
IBM/Lotus also has nearly a dozen research projects, including a handful poised to become products, for mining, cataloging
and searching everyday work and sharing it with others.
On its alphaWorks emerging technology site, IBM/Lotus has made a blog tool available and will release it as a product later
this year for Workplace Collaboration Services 2.6, a set of server-based collaboration tools expected to ship this fall.
IBM/Lotus also is working on a similar wiki tool but has not announced when it will become a product.
In addition, the company plans to support RSS and Atom syndication-feed technology across its product line including Domino
Web Access, QuickPlace, WebSphere Content Manager, Portal Document Manager and forms-based technology. The feeds also are
being tapped for publish and subscribe capabilities, machine-to-machine data transfer and tracking collaborative activity.
