Social Networking: Not Just For Teens Anymore

Think of it as MySpace for businesspeople. Internet-based social-networking services today are most popular among consumers, particularly the teen-age set. But social-networking tools hold a lot of promise for business applications too.

IBM Lotus and Microsoft have recently debuted software products with social-networking capabilities. But how quickly will they catch on? And what role will solution providers play in bringing these capabilities to the business world?

Readers may recall the hoopla around "knowledge management"--a catchphrase in the late 1990s. But it didn't quite stick, because everyone seemed to have a different idea of what it was. Some viewed it as the ability to locate documents and other content throughout a company and beyond--an oil-company manager, for example, who needed to track down a report on arctic tundra-drilling he read a few years earlier. Today, content-management systems and search technology go a long way toward meeting those needs.

The other aspect of knowledge management was helping people find experts or expertise. Think of a task group that's putting together a customer proposal and could use some input from an employee with deep knowledge of the target customer's vertical industry.

Given the growing popularity of sites like MySpace and services like Plaxo and LinkedIn, it's no surprise that IBM Lotus and Microsoft see the potential here. Their competing social-networking technologies could prove to be a pivotal front in the broader battle between the two vendors' communications and collaboration product lines.

Lotus Connections, announced at last month's Lotusphere conference and due out in the second quarter, is designed along the same lines as the in-house "blue pages" system IBM has long used to link some 340,000 employees. Connections provides users with a workspace for posting personal blogs and developing profiles with descriptions of their interests and expertise.

The application's search tools let users search the system by name, expertise or keyword. It lets people with common interests and work objectives form communities, bookmark and share documents and Web pages. An "Activities" feature offers a dashboard for employees working on a project to manage discrete tasks by organizing and sharing files, e-mails, instant messages and Web links.

Although Connections will be integrated with Lotus Notes/Domino, the software is Web-based, so businesses don't have to be Lotus Notes owners to use the new social-networking software, says Lotus general manager Mike Rhodin.

Microsoft's Knowledge Network is an add-on to SharePoint Server 2007, which debuted last month and expands the software's people-search functions to include expertise. The product automatically builds and updates employee profiles by crawling through server-side data, client-side e-mails and instant messages, but users maintain control over who can access their profiles.

IBM Lotus is hoping that many of its 5,000-plus solution providers working with Notes/Domino, Sametime and other Lotus software will add Connections to their product lineups, building applications based on the social-networking technology. But Marjorie Tenzer, vice president of marketing and channels at IBM Lotus, admits that channel partners are trying to figure out what social-networking technology means to them.

Some are catching on. "This is a very new idea in business. Extending the types of information that can be shared throughout a company this way is really revolutionary," says Bob McCandless, CEO of Alphalogix, a Huntington Beach, Calif.-based solution provider that builds portal-, workflow- and content-management systems around Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal. McCandless says social networking could help resolve a common problem with workflow applications: engaging people and having them take ownership of a business process.

Alphalogix is integrating Connections with its own products. The idea is that information about people generated by Connections can be fed into workflow applications. A help-desk system, for example, can use that data to route trouble tickets to people with the right expertise. "The information you glean from the social network can give you a lot of power to make business processes flow between users," McCandless says.

Meanwhile, market-research firm IDC has listed social networking as a "disruptive" technology for 2007 that will change how companies communicate. Disruption in the IT world, of course, can be good or bad. Alphalogix's McCandless says the challenge will be helping customers understand how the social-networking concept applies to their business.