Enterprise Social Networking

Editor's Notes

• #29: IBM Lotus Sametime is the solution that can best help you run your business in real time. Lotus Sametime has always provided instant, anytime access to people and information through three key concepts: Presence awareness. See, in advance, whether a person or application is available to collaborate, share information or take an action. Instant messaging. Converse in real-time with one or many people via text messages, with optional audio/video integration. Web conferencing. Share information, an application or an entire desktop. Engage in team white boarding.
• #44: When we set out to develop Lotus Connections, we had these ideas in mind. It’s social software for business that empowers people to be more effective and innovative by building dynamic networks of corworkers, partners, and customers. Lotus Connections consists of five services: Profiles is a “white pages” directory that helps you reach individuals. Profiles also forms a kind of hub for the other services, as we’ll see. Communities is a listing service for groups of people. It helps people organize around a common interest. The blog service allows indviduals and teams to blog, and attract readers who can then connect by commenting on their blogs. Dogear is a social bookmarking service. It makes it easy for people to organize bookmarks and share them with others as they work. And Activities is a simple collaboration service that helps individuals to organize their work and coordinate their collaborations with other people.
• #45: All of the Connections services provide a web interface and simple APIs, providing universal access and simple extensibility and embeddability. Beyond this, though, Connections includes a number of “on-ramps” that integrate the Connections services into the tools you already use. The type and depth of integration varies with what is most applicable given the tools and the Connections services. Its also important to note that all of these “plugins” and “on-ramps” are built using our own APIs, which are also available for partners and customers to use. The Notes 8 activity sidebar is perhaps the most powerful plugin, providing even some features beyond the web application via the benefits of the rich client platform of Notes. Activities and communities naturally integrate with Sametime – providing the ability to broadcast questions or information to a community and to find related activities or save a chat directly to an activity without leaving the chat window. The ability to post documents directly from Office to an activity streamlines the transformation of work from the document-centric world to the more natural activity-centric environment. The portal integration allows all of the services to be added to a portal page or composite application. The wiring and parameters supported by the Connections portlet allow the contents to be filtered by service, tag, user and other properties. For example, a composite application which manages a particular process can include the Connections portlet showing only activities with a particular tag, enabling the use of activity-centric computing specifically targeted to the application at hand. Universal and consistent support for feeds in all of the Connections services allows your favorite feed reader to connect to any or all of the services, showing, for example, a feed of new entries to your high priority activities, another feed off of a colleague’s bookmarks and another off of new blog entries with a particular tag. There are a variety of other integration points – simple bookmarklets for posting links as bookmarks, activity or community entries; the profiles contextual business card and so on. In addition, the simple atom-based REST API makes it simple to create all sorts of mashups .