This week is IBM’s annual collaboration conference called Lotusphere. IBM is an alliance partner of ours, so we asked Luis Benitez to write this guest blog piece for us to let us know what we’ll be seeing this week. Luis Benitez is a Consulting Enterprise 2.0 Specialist with IBM and leads the WW Lotus Social Software community within IBM. He has been working on early adopter customer deployments of Lotus Connections since January 2007. Luis has been with IBM for 8 years and prior to his current role he worked as a consultant for IBM Software Services for Lotus. You can read Luis’ blog at http://www.lbenitez.com.
Lotusphere is known as the conference where the collaboration strategy for the rest of the year is communicated. Today, in the opening keynote address, IBM announced its plans for continuing to drive its Enterprise 2.0 platform, Lotus Connections, forward.
Lotus Connections, IBM’s flagship Enterprise 2.0 platform, will be incorporating numerous new features in the coming months. There are several new capabilities that are worth noting.
During the keynote, IBM reviewed the new features that were added into the latest offering of IBM Lotus Connections v2.5. The audience was also reminded about IBM’s big win with Panasonic dumping Microsoft and moving its 300,000 employees to the IBM-hosted collaboration solution LotusLive. Some of the features that wow’ed the audience were the new iPhone access, the new personal file sharing service, and the new capabilities in community spaces that provide for more targeted collaboration.
Enterprise 2.0 Where Your Eyes Are
IBM believes that it’s essential to bring Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to the users instead of trying to bring users to new Enterprise 2.0 platforms. For that reason, IBM architected Lotus Connections around SOA principles and has created plug-ins so that the Lotus Connections platform is accessible from Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Windows Explorer, Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, WebSphere Portal, RIM’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, and Nokia’s S60.
At the keynote, IBM set forth its vision for what’s next. First, it’s going to be easier for end-users to find and invite colleagues to join their network. Additionally, it’s going to continue building deeper integrations with other enterprise applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint. A pain point that has been echoed by many Sharepoint users is that Sharepoint creates silos and doesn’t do a good job of promoting knowledge re-use. IBM’s platform fills this gap and will continue to create deeper links between Connections and Sharepoint to break down those silos and create a unified knowledge source. This means that users browsing Sharepoint will have seamless access to Lotus Connections data (experts, communities, bookmarks, wikis, microblogging, etc). Similarly, as those users are browsing Lotus Connections they’ll be able to access data in Sharepoint such as file repositories.
Second, IBM also announced that it’ll be creating deeper links into WebSphere Portal. Most organizations that deploy a portal spend time and effort in making it a destination for its employees. By ‘socializing’ the portal, organizations will have a sure way of attracting users and keeping them engaged. At the same time, the end user benefits because they only have a single user interface to learn and use. They will no longer be required to jump back and forth between disparate applications to effectively collaborate.
Mobile Continues to Improve
Another welcomed announcement was the brand new native Blackberry applications that provide native access to Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. Mobile access to an Enterprise 2.0 platform is key for end-user adoption according to IBM. What’s interesting too is that the applications were built entirely by RIM and since RIM hasn’t done this for any other Enterprise 2.0 platform, it validates IBM as a leader in this field.
And speaking of links, IBM also re-iterated the importance of not only engaging employees for internal collaboration, but involving external users as well. Therefore, IBM will be adding some features to create safe social customer communities which increase loyalty and revenue. This will allow IBM to compete more strongly in the B2C segment, which is growing faster than the B2E segment.
