Peer to peer networking within your corporation has been greatly expedited by the introduction of IBM’s Lotus Connections. Now far flung enterprises with national and international reach can create a community of colleagues similar to internet hot spots such as FaceBook and MyPages.

“Organisations will be able to combine all the elements of social networking sites like MySpace with traditional business software for the first time, claimed IBM as it launched its new software suite Lotus Connections.
Lotus Connections will allow employees to share resources and ideas through blogs, online communities, instant chat and shared bookmarks in a professional business environment.”

Since employees have already been using social networking outside of the company, this new Lotus software launched this week will bring them all together within the company portal, providing an unprecedented ability to interact, collaborate, share knowledge and brain storm.

” IBM said that the most valuable asset to any company is employee knowledge and the ability to uncover and share expertise within an organisation is of key importance.

The web 2.0 social software works with existing IBM Lotus business software and has many inter-application uses. A chat between co-workers, for example, can be dragged and dropped into a shared activity for all project participants to see.
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“Now, with Lotus Connections, we can offer a business-ready solution that adds new social software functionality to existing and new portals for intranets, extranets and internet sites.”
(Source)