IBM Shows Off Social Software for Business
The press attending Lotusphere viewed some of the software currently in development at IBM's labs today, including two projects aimed at bringing social networks and virtual worlds into the enterprise.
Bluegrass
Bluegrass is a virtual world for employees to bounce ideas off each other and talk about business, or just life in general. It reminded me of my chat with Sun Microsystems about MPK20, their internal virtual world hosted behind the firewall.
Steve Rohall and Li-Te Cheng, two of IBM researchers working on Bluegrass, told me that while they view virtual worlds as a great way to have meetings, they also want to use them to enable more serendipitous discussions between geographically dispersed employees. This has typically been the shortfall of existing technologies, such as audio conferencing – when the call ends, so does the social interaction.
By contrast, in a virtual world, an employee from Michigan could have an informal conversation after a meeting with a co-worker in California. As a result, by allowing workers to think more tangentially outside a formalized meeting, they can stumble upon new ideas. This project, to me, shows once again why virtual worlds are no fad.
Beehive
Beehive looks like the business response to Facebook, or at least a good attempt at it. A completely separate development project from the profiling function in Connections, IBM’s social software suite, Beehive looks to further connect workers by sharing information about themselves, using photos, lists, and events. The interface appeared remarkably clean for a social network not developed in the consumer space. They also created features that encourage user engagement. The “My Top 5” serves as a good example, in which employees post five things that are important to them for their peers to see.
Beth Brownhotlz, who has been working on Beehive, told me 6,000 IBM employees currently use it.
While a demo is a demo, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Beehive usurp the profiling function of Connections, which analysts have told me hasn’t been utilized all that much by customers of the software.
Previous Post: Should Social Networks Be Banned at Work? Next Post: Recession: A Ripe Time for Web 2.0 Vendors to Strike in the Enterprise?
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
