And you thought social networking was all about text-messaging among bored teenagers.
IBM has another take on it.
The company was set to announce yesterday a set of social software tools that will bring the kind of blogging, idea sharing and war-story swapping typically associated with MySpace and Facebook -- the social networking sites popular among teenagers and college students -- to the corporate world.
Called Lotus Connections, the new software will let employees set up virtual worlds in which they can meet like-minded colleagues within the company and exchange ideas with them, all in the name of improving productivity. And that's just for starters.
The idea, said IBM vice president for social software Jeff Schick, is to "unlock the latent expertise in an organization."
IBM was planning to show the software yesterday in Orlando, Florida, at an annual conference for developers who work with the company's Lotus group, which produces Lotus Notes. An early leader in collaboration software, or "groupware," Lotus Notes has been under attack in recent years from Microsoft's Exchange software.
"Microsoft has been a tough challenge for the Lotus Group," said Erica Driver, an analyst with Forrester Research, a market analysis and consulting company. "Focusing on new technologies is a good approach."
Last week, IBM reported that strong software sales had helped lift the company's profits and revenue for the last quarter, slightly surpassing Wall Street's estimates.
The performance provided some encouragement that IBM's push to revamp its software strategy, including projects like Connections, was gaining ground.
Many companies have already discovered the benefits of bringing social networking into their businesses, but so far most of the tools available to them have focused on a specific element of social networking, like blogging.
"I talk to corporate clients every day, and I'm finding the topic of social networking comes up all the time," Driver said. "What IBM has done validates the use of social computing tools for businesses."
Lotus Connections has five components -- activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs -- aimed at helping specialists within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs.
The profiles component, for example, lets users search for people by name, specialty or keyword. The program then provides contact information and lists blogs, communities, activities and bookmarks associated with the person.
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