IBM To Launch Enterprise Social Networking Software Called 'Lotus Connections'

IBM will today announce the forthcoming release of its Lotus Connections, a set of blogging and social networking software built to improve intra-company productivity. Like a My Space designed for the corporate world, Lotus Connections will allow a company's employees to set up virtual worlds in which they can meet like-minded colleagues and trade ideas. According to IBM's VP for Social Software, Jeff Schick, The purpose of Lotus is to “unlock the latent expertise in an organization.” IBM will introduce the software at the annual Lotus Developers Conference being held in Orlando this year. IBM's software unit has been a true growth driver for the company recently with management reporting last week that software revenues increased 14% over the prior year period. Lotus Connections will likely pose a challenge to Microsoft Exchange.

• Sources: Press Release, New York Times, Reuters, MarketWatch , IBM Q4 2006 Earnings Call Transcript
• Related commentary: IBM Flexing Muscle In Software, Does IBM Spell Trouble For Hardware Sales?, IBM Profit Up 11%, but Shares Drop on Hardware Sales
• Potentially impacted stocks and ETFs: International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). Competitors: Microsoft (MSFT). ETFs: Internet Architecture HOLDRS (IAH), iShares Goldman Sachs Technology (IGM), Technology SPDR (XLK)

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Comments

[Lizet:]

IBM is keeping a dying dinosaur in Lotus Notes and Domino. If you've worked in a company using Notes for email client and also have worked in a company using Outlook and Exchange with SharePoint for knowledge repository, you will understand my pain.
Lotus Notes is unintuitive, with a hard to use interface, not to mention very closed and un-scalable, from a developers point of view.
Google for extending or programming a Lotus Notes application.
Making an add on for Outlook or implementing a workflow in SharePoint is fairly easy. If you Google for it you'll find plenty of hits and documentation.
The only reason why IBM has been able to keep this poor quality tools is the size of the clients using them and how rigid these type of organizations are (apart from migration tools).
imho, betting for Lotus Notes is betting to the wrong horse. Time will tell though.

Mar 03 09:15 PM