B's Blog

Hey there, did anyone attend the Lotus Mashups online webinar today? I'm not sure what to really think about the new Lotus Mashups, it seems like a cool idea but still a little to complicated for the average business user. Also, I think there may be a concern around opening up backend information for users to access. It seems to me that everything would have to be locked down and read-only for Mashups to be truly accepted by IT organizations, yet part of the reason that Mashups could be very powerful would be the ability to interface and change the data that is stored in systems such as SAP. It's a toss up to me as to how useful Mashups will actually be without changing backend data, but in the same respect how many IT organizations will actually trust their business users to access and change this data? I guess we'll see how it all plays out in the next year or so.

Signing off,
B

So I have some candid feedback on what I think Connections does great, and what I think is lacking. First I'll start with the things that it does great.

This software offers 5 different services all from the same sight. It's a combination of MySpace, Del.icio.us, and Blogger with a few extra features. Now granted it doesn't offer everything that the combination of those services has, but it does offer them the possibility of interacting together, which is really cool. The profiles may not be as customizable as a MySpace profile, but you can tag yourself and create your own content, which is more difficult to find in a profiling system than one might think. Dogear is pretty much the coolest thing since sliced bread, given that you can not only have your own personal dogears but you can also have dogears that are relevant to a specific group of people (aka a Community).

As far as the features that are not available in the Connections product (1.0.2, after having gone to Lotusphere '08 I know they are adding some of the features I'm about to list). One of the biggest drawbacks (for us personally), is the lack of an integrated wiki. We would like to have a Wiki that can be searched through Connections, not through the wiki's own search function. Also, the lack of a forum complete with the ability to poll is also a missing feature. Polling is a great way to get feedback, and unfortunately is not a feature of this release. It also seems that Communities in general is lacking much depth, the only thing you can really do as of right now is share bookmarks and feeds.

All in all, Lotus Connections offers up a great many services in one easy to use interface, I think that a few more versions of this will offer the features mentioned above and will definitely make IBM and Lotus the leader in the social software market.

Signing off,
B