I attended a semi education today, held by IBM’s GTU, part of their quarterly relationship events with the developers community. The education was titled ‘Web 2.0 for the Enterprise‘, and featured a lecture by David Boloker (Strategy CTO, Emerging Internet Technology, IBM SW Group) and a live demo by Vova Soroka (Senior Manager, Collaboration Technologies, IBM Haifa Research Labs).
David talked a bit about Web 2.0 technologies, especially the implications for the enterprise and how IBM is putting it to use, using the recently announced Lotus Connections. I’ve heard David in the past, at a recent Lotus event 3-4 months ago, and his insights are always current and up-to-date.
The second half of the education was a live demo by Vova Soroka. Vova and his team followed-up on David’s introduction to web 2.0 technologies (ajax, rss, web-services, mushups, wikis, etc) and took the audience through IBM’s web 2.0 tools:
- Fringe (enhanced employee directory)
- Connections (a shared, browser-based workspace)
- SameTime SONAR plug-in (IBM internal IM with a ‘popularity’ plug-in that analyzes your interactions and scores your buddy list)
- and a new QEDWiki platform, that’s available for download at IBM’s alphaWorks site.
I’m not a developer, so I won’t get into the technical details of each tool, but I will say that it has been an eye opener for me. I consider myself an early adopter, and like to test beta versions of different internal IBM softwares, but the possibilities of web 2.0 for the enterprise are endless. Especially if you’re working at IBM… 😉
You can see a video of Rod Smith from IBM, on ‘Mushing up Business Value with Web 2.0’, from the recent Web 2.0 Expo, held this April in San Francisco. You can access some of the sessions’ material over at the presentations archive.
Also, a 9 minute demo of QEDWiki:
Can’t see the video? click here.
