A few years ago, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn were not around. Not many of us could have predicted how pervasive the social technologies have become not only online, but also in our daily lives.
From 3Q 2008 to 3Q 2009, IBM’s social collaboration software install base grew by 34 percent. This growth is representative of the value that businesses are seeing in social software. With IBM remaining staunchly committed to open standards and integration with partner solutions, IBM is making social collaboration software more pervasive across a wide range of devices and applications so that businesses have the ability to connect people with relevant information. Make no mistake, the whole area of social collaboration within the corporate environment is inevitable and is going to be big, and IBM Lotus are well ahead of the competition.
‘Over the past few years, we have witnessed the evolution of social software in business,’ said Jeff Schick, vice president, IBM Social Software. ‘Businesses are now seeing the value that collaboration brings to the enterprise by connecting people and information. With the next releases of Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections, we will deliver expanded functionality and improved performance to help simplify collaboration and increase efficiency.’
The next release of Lotus Connections plans to include new features such as an automated people and social content recommendation to help users build broader, more powerful professional networks and a photo/video sharing capability that will support consumer generated content on extranet sites to increase site traffic and foster customer communities.
Also planned are other Connections features that include improved moderation of user-generated content to provide safe communities as well as compliance and auditing capabilities to deliver the value of social software to regulated industries.
