KEY POINTS:
IBM is looking to popular consumer Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networking tools to breathe new life into its Lotus Notes mail and messaging platform.
The computing giant says research shows businesses have become too reliant on email as a tool of communication and will offer new ways for colleagues to collaborate and share information with a suite of tools dubbed Lotus Connections.
The Lotus mail platform has struggled to gain traction in New Zealand. The Bay of Plenty health board, baggage handling system maker Glidepath and Herald publisher APN News & Media are among its local clients.
But IBM says Connections can be used independently of its mail platform as a web-based portal and that 40 per cent of IBM's existing sales of portal software are to organisations that do not run Lotus Notes for email, but rivals such as Microsoft Outlook.
Connections is partly modelled on IBM's in-house personnel directory, Blue Pages, which has profiles of around 330,000 IBM employees.
Connections profiles, much like a user can assemble on websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, show the details of employees who can also set up blogs, use a service called Dogear to swap internet bookmarks with colleagues, participate in online communities and subscribe to RSS feeds to keep up with company developments.
Lotus Software program director for social computing software Heidi Votaw said using online social networking tools outside of the office had become second nature to young workers.
"In colleges and universities, that's how they get their work done. Their expectation is that they'll be able to leverage those technologies in their working life," she said.
New ways of managing information were grouping employees into networks linked by messaging tools, blogs and community groups, rather than a strict corporate hierarchy, said Votaw.
She pointed to a recent survey from US company Ogilvy Research which showed that 23 per cent of upper management believe email use is reducing efficiency.
The same survey found that 45 per cent of executives check their email inbox every five to 30 minutes.
Connections allowed documents to be posted to the portal and employees to be updated of any document changes via RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, rather than documents being shuffled around via the company email system.
"It saves mail storage space, because it stops the mail files from getting too big," she said.
In a few months of use within IBM, Connections had established a network of more than 9000 blogs and 700 community groups.
About 3.5 million profile searches are performed each week.
In IBM's Sydney-based development lab, software engineers have also been working on Quickr, a set of tools similarly inspired by the social networking trend.
Quickr features team collaboration tools that help companies use blogs and wikis to help teams share and write documents, collaborate on projects at the same time and tap into databases through the use of software plug-ins.
"I was the biggest sceptic, it looked like the direction was a little misguided," said Nick Baldwin, a project manager at the software lab.
"It wasn't until this stuff was used internally that I was convinced about it."
The Sydney team has just finished several months of work on Quickr which, with the release of Lotus Notes 8 and IBM's instant messaging and telephony platform SameTime, form the company's core offerings in a space that's rapidly becoming known as Enterprise 2.0.
Both Quickr and Lotus Connections are now available in New Zealand.
* Peter Griffin visited IBM's Sydney software lab as a guest of IBM
NEW TOOLS
* Lotus Connections: allows users to create profiles, set up blogs, swap internet bookmarks, participate in online communities and subscribe to RSS feeds.
* Quickr: uses blogs and wikis to allow companies to share and write documents, collaborate on projects at the same time and tap into databases.
