IBM full Lotus position

IBM Lotus Takes Social Networking to New Heights--I've been a LOTUS fan for years, from 1-2-3 to Magellan to Agenda to Notes, even through the transitional years of LetOnlyTheUsersSuffer when support was in short supply. Now, here's a new iteration we're going to have to watch closely. For me, reading the whole article, it sounds like it might help my workload and overall organization. Here's the lead-in:

With collaboration as its legacy, IBM's Lotus division went back to its roots and announced its plans to deliver social software for businesses.

IBM's announcements at the company's Lotusphere 2007 show here represent the "most dramatic expansion of collaborative technology ever," according to Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM Lotus, particularly as opposed to competitive alternatives "that tell you what you have to buy."

Foremost among the new technologies IBM announced on Jan. 22 is Lotus Connections, which enables users to gather and share information through social networks and provides dashboard views of projects, people and connections in various communities.

The Lotus Connections software borrows from IBM's deep research pockets and features five Web 2.0 technologies: Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs. Activities is a Lotus technology that shares and organizes e-mail, instant messages, documents and other items related to a particular activity or project into one logical unit. Dogear is social bookmarking software that enables users to bookmark pages within their intranet. Both technologies came out
of IBM Research.

Rhodin called Lotus Connections "the industry's first ready-for-business social software platform to connect us to you, and you to us, and you to each other and to others beyond this room."