Wednesday 1 February 2006

Light layer of collaboration

You might remember that last year I went on a bit about the history of Lotus Notes and how it links with the current evolution of social software out on the Internet. Well, IBM are holding their annual Lotusphere conference where according to a report, IBM "showed off plans to infuse its entire collaborative software lineup with so-called social networking technology such as blogs, wikis and syndication feeds."

In the report IBM'er Duncan Mewherter - and one of the people behind a preview (released last August) of a Weblogging component that can plug into Workplace platform - is quoted as describing social software as a "light layer of collaboration". Hop over to IBM's alphaWorks for more information.

Of course the cynics will say IBM (and others) are just jumping on the bandwagon. Now while we should expect a bit of hype from the vendors, overall for enterprises I think this is a good thing.

Tags: ,

2 comments:

  1. Crikey ... now that's going to force a few legal departments to get up to speed with their internal policies on staff doing ad hoc web publishing.

    Good for them for thinking about integrating these tools into their lineup, but I think they are missing the real power of Web2.0, which is maching together best-of-breed solutions from different vendors (i.e. the internet is the platform).

    This highlights that IT departments are increasingly going to come under pressure as their users become more tech-savvy and start wanting to bring the devices and tools they use in their personal lives into the workplace.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your last comment is exactly one of the points we discussed in my master class this week... for some IT departments this transition is going to cause a lot of pain but the technology almost makes it unavoidable.

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.