Lotusphere: IBM embraces social tools with updates to Connections platform

ORLANDO: IBM has unveiled a series of major updates to its Connections social networking tool designed to boost its collaboration capabilities and make the platform available on all major mobile operating systems.

Unveiling the changes at its annual Lotusphere event, the firm explained the updates were designed to help businesses take advantage of the benefits of using data from social networks to gain better insights and make better decisions.

Key to this is the inclusion of the firm’s Cognos analytics tool within the platform in order to analyse the sentiment of messages on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook and share this information across the Connections platform.

It has also added the ability for staff to access and share documents, images, video and access applications via a live stream that mimics the look of Facebook and Twitter in order to offer collaboration in real-time from a single location.

Speaking at the event, Alistair Rennie, general manager for collaboration solutions at IBM, said taking advantage of social data and providing a platform to share this data will help firms derive numerous benefits.

“The application of social tools and data to business processes can help take advantage of a firms’ collective intelligence, helping lead to the creation of new ideas and improved working practices,” he said.

“However, embracing social media is not just an IT project, it requires a change to the organisation’s culture, training people to do new things and embrace these changes.”

IBM also announced it has included the ability to integrate its Lotus email tool within Connections as one example of the way any application can be configured to run on the platform in order to help improve staff productivity.

"By opening Connections up to the widest developer ecosystem we have ever embraced we can let firms embed any number of applications so staff can access key tools from a single destination," Rennie added.

Analyst Clive Longbottom told V3 that the ability to integrate applications on top of the Connections tool could prove an enticing prospect to businesses, but only if it was actively embraced.

“By adding more capabilities and acting as an aggression portal with connectors through to other functions and adding analytics, IBM is helping organisations gain a good level of control over their collaborative environments,” he said

“But will the end users like such control, or will they bypass it and go straight to external uncontrolled systems?”

The firm also announced that it was making the platform available across all major mobile platforms, chiefly iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, to allow users to access information and share data wherever they are.

“The use of mobile is now central to IBM as anything people can do on the desktop they want to do on mobile devices so we are now working to make this possible for all our tools,” added Rennie.

“We took a position that we would not try and pick the winners in the mobile space and instead would support all the key platforms, with lots of quick, short releases to help provide value to users.”