New IBM Lotus connections software brings consumer social networking features to the office

Mumbai: IBM today announced an expanded set of social software tools and capabilities for enterprise collaboration that brings popular features like micro-blogging from the home into the business environment. Leading companies such as NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH and Sogeti are among the early adopters of IBM's collaboration platform, Lotus Connections 2.5.

Realizing the benefits of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, IBM is bringing a comprehensive social software platform to businesses with the debut of Lotus Connections 2.5.

''With Lotus Connections, we have merged document sharing and social networking capabilities to create a comprehensive collaboration platform for businesses,'' said Karthik Padmanabhan, country manager for Lotus at IBM India / South Asia.''Today's announcement showcases how IBM is delivering easy access to a company's two most valuable assets – people and information.''

Lotus Connections, which originated at IBM Research, is an example of the types of technologies that result from the Centre for Social Software's incubator for innovative technologies. The new release of Lotus Connections expands on IBM's commitment to bringing a business-grade social software platform to the market. With the extranet, Internet and intranet collaboration services provided by IBM and IBM customers, Lotus Connections enables tens of millions of users worldwide to connect and collaborate.

Lotus Connections 2.5 includes an enhanced Communities experience with new features and capabilities. Community owners can now customize the appearance of their community and move widgets around on the community home page. Community owners can add activities, blogs, wikis, and file sharing services to their communities in addition to bookmarks, feeds, and forum capabilities. This significantly enhances the options for community members to collaborate on projects and content.

Additionally, the user interface of the community discussion forum now displays threads in a more conversational format with user photos. A statistics feature indicates the most popular discussion topics in a community and provides insight into which users are the most active participants. Important discussion topics can be highlighted with the capability to pin them at the top of the forum.