IBM recently announced its new strategy for the Lotus family of products. It is embracing social networking technologies and expanding Lotus into a full-blooded collaboration platform. Existing Lotus offerings like Notes/Domino and Sametime are still vital components. IBM's vision, however, is driven by two new members of the Lotus family: Connections and Quickr.

Lotus Connections

IBM Lotus Connections helps users find other people in the enterprise. It is an integrated and extensible set of social software services. It borrows concepts and approaches that were popularized by consumer offerings like Flickr and Facebook. It includes a variety of different services:

• Blogs. Connections brings blogs into the enterprise and provides a framework that enables employees to both create and subscribe to blogs. With Connections, blog activity becomes an important means of profiling an individual's expertise, project involvement, and interests.
• Shared bookmarks. Users can label various documents with tags ("dogear" in IBM parlance). The effectiveness of distributed tagging for identifying information assets is demonstrated by...