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CIO Executive Council

A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives

Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.

Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices

Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.

Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices

This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.

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Understanding Lotus Connections, IBM's Version of Web 2.0 For The Enterprise

As innovation in the consumer space spills over into the enterprise, IBM believes its social software suite that includes blogs and social networks for business will give users the collaboration features they want while giving IT the ability to hook it into existing systems.

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.