Business News and Information

I.B.M. (IBM) will soon introduce to the corporate world a set of social software tools that will mirror the ability to blog, network, idea share and story swap that teens and college students have enjoyed in sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

It will be called Lotus Connections (kind of feng shui-ish sounding eh?) and is expected to blossum (Lotus, get it?) later this year. It will let employees set up virtual worlds in which they can meet like-minded colleagues within the company and exchange ideas with them all in the quest for better productivity, according to this NYTimes.com article. 

The company plans on showing the software today in Orlando, Fla., at an annual conference for Lotus group developers. In fact, Lotus Notes was an early leader in the collaboration software genre and has come under attack by the mighty giant Microsoft's (MSFT) Exchange software.  

I.B.M. has been in the news of late for strong software sales that helped the company's profits and revenue last quarter surpass, albeit slightly, Wall Street's estimates.

Lotus Connections will focus on five areas: activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs. Employees of I.B.M. have been using a prototype of the profiles feature, which allows you to search for people by name, expertise or keyword, for a few years and have 450,000 profiles stored there. 

This isn't the only iron in the fire. I.B.M Research has a few projects under their labcoats such as Second Life, a virtual world that allows people to communicate in a three-dimensional universe. Interesting. So the day of 'let's do lunch' might give way to 'lets get virtual.'