What's In Connections (And Why It's Not SharePoint)

Connections consists of five core tools: social networking profiles, Dogear (a social bookmarking tool, like del.icio.us for the enterprise), blogs, activities (which allows colleagues to communicate to others what they are working on), and communities (a place to have an online forum and discuss ideas and interact with co-workers).

Unlike SharePoint, which started off as a document management system and then recently added Web 2.0 features, Connections is strictly a social software offering. IBM's main competitor to the document sharing aspect of SharePoint can be found in Lotus Quickr.

So wouldn't it be easier to put both its document management (Quickr) and social software (Connections) under one banner to compete with Microsoft SharePoint? IBM says no.

"I do get the point that from a naming and branding point of view, it'd be interesting to see it come under one umbrella," says Jeff Schick, VP of Social Software at IBM. "But in not doing so, we've differentiated the capabilities of social software with document sharing. We have also built-in integration from the different services [Quickr and Connections] to make a seamless user experience as well."

Users access Connections through a Web browser on the front end. In terms of hosting the data, Connections runs primarily on-premise (meaning, the customer buys a server to host the software), but Schick says that IBM has been beta-testing a SaaS (software-as-a-service) version, which would host users' data online.

"We see SaaS as a substantial initiative with IBM," Schick says. "We're in beta and focusing on it. We envision it for small and medium businesses, but also at the department level of enterprises."

Partnering and Integrating with Other Vendors (And Their Products)

While analysts say that IBM did a good job designing their social software tools, the company has partnered with enterprise 2.0 vendors to give its customers more choice to plug in third-party technologies such as wikis and blogs that have already become native to some enterprise environments.

IBM partnered with enterprise wiki makers Socialtext and Atlassian during the past year so their products could hook into Connections more easily.

"Many of these partners, especially in the wiki space, have enjoyed quite a good bit of marketshare," says Schick. "We want to be a flexible [offering] that plugs in. We don't want our customers to have to do a rip and replace."

But the real bonus for enterprises is the fact that IBM has worked out integration issues between Connections and other more traditional enterprise systems, such as e-mail, says the Yankee Group's Edwards.