Lotus, Microsoft jostle to land social networking customers

Rivals IBM/Lotus and Microsoft Tuesday used the Enterprise 2.0 conference to push their social networking agenda with Lotus releasing its previously announced suite of services and Microsoft building around its SharePoint Server.

In January, IBM/Lotus introduced Lotus Connections as part of its push to develop social software for business users. Tuesday, the company released Connections and said Lotus Quickr, IBM’s rework of its Lotus QuickPlace team sharing platform, would ship next week. Connections is an integrated bundle of social networking tools including blogging, bookmark sharing, user profiles and software to track activities and build online communities.

IBM also introduced Info 2.0, a way for companies to extract data from applications and databases using syndication technology and use it in mashups.

Microsoft Tuesday unveiled some of its social software efforts, although they are a bit rougher around the edges than the two finished products Louts unveiled.

Microsoft’s foundation for its social software is Office SharePoint Server 2007. On Tuesday the company made available early releases on its Codeplex Web site, and its Community Kit for SharePoint that includes Enhanced Blog, Enhanced Wiki, ChatterBox Ajax and Tag Cloud. The tools are designed to let users create community Web sites.

In addition, Microsoft said it is committing to build 100 social networking business applications before June 2008 for use inside the company. One currently in development is SharePointPedia, which helps users find SharePoint technical and support information from both Microsoft and other sources. The company also is using personal Web sites call My Site, wikis and mash ups to foster collaboration.

The company plans to build its social networking capabilities such as expertise search, blogs, RSS feeds, and profiles into the SharePoint platform, according to company officials.

Analysts say both vendors are starting to moves corporate users from the buzz stage into bleeding edge adoption but that deployments are measured.

“We are seeing adoption among business units but not corporate wide,” says Josh Holbrook, And right now were seeing a lot of one-off or point solutions, but not adoption of a broad suite of services.”

Holbrook says he see IBM/Lotus moving out front with Connections and Microsoft as a fast follower.

Connections pulls together IBM’s BluePages, an end-user directory for profiles; Dogear, a bookmark sharing application, Activities, a sophisticated to-do list, Communities, for pulling together groups of users and Roller, a blog server developed within the Apache Software Foundation. Connections is a set of server-based services, so it is not a new platform to install but one that can be added to existing tools through integration with the forthcoming Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5.1 clients that are based on the Lotus Expeditor and Eclipse client frameworks.

In addition, IBM also said Info 2.0 would bring “mash-up like” capabilities to enterprise data. The technology is coming from IBM’s data management division.