IBM has released an enterprise social networking suite called Lotus Connections. The suite has five components:

• Activities
• Dogear (a book marking del.icio.us style system)
• Communities
• Profiles
• Blogs (well we all love blogs these days don’t we)

The aim of these Web 2.0 components is to help experts connect and collaborate within an organisation.

Some people are claiming IBM are just trying to cash in on the current Social Networking trend, others are going as far as to proclaim “The Death of Social Networking” [1] as if big businesses are doing it, then surely it’s not cool anymore.

Now I’ve worked on a large corporate Intranet system in my previous job and now work developing a social networking website [2]. I believe Intranets are often undervalued by many corporations, not only do they have the potential to affectively catalogue and distribute large amounts of business information but if included with custom web applications they can also streamline/replace clunky manual systems that exist in many establishments.

If IBM manages to deliver a product that successfully merges web 2.0 style collaborative social networks with traditional business Intranets, then you have a situation where the Intranet is potentially the core of the business and where huge amounts of communication and collaboration are done using it. If done correctly these new Intranets will give employees the same feel good factor associated with a social-networking/online-communities and they will also benefit the company through increased productivity, communication and shared information.

For those of you not so convinced look at it this way, if this system provided facilities that meant you could cut the amount of boring meeting you have to attend in half wouldn’t you be interesting in trying it?

# Pete Graham

[1] I will be discussing “the death of social networking websites” later this week as I feel its worthy of a complete blog entry

[2] I work developing phuser.com the official description for phuser is “the antidote to social networking websites”