The Lotus Connections product represents a new classification of applications within the enterprise. It is targeted as a social network tool to allow for dynamic end user collaboration through Web 2.0 tools and technologies.
The product has five key areas that it brings into an environment. Each of these can be deployed separately or mixed and matched as needed. However, to fully take advantage of this product, all five should work in unison. The five areas are as follows:
- Profiles provide for personal information about end users within the environment. This can include reporting structures, contact information, and associated content within the remaining four components.
- Communities provide for a collaboration environment based upon the wiki structure.
- Blogs provide for basic blogging services for an enterprise.
- Dogear provides for intelligent bookmarking services across all of the Lotus Connections application. It also has the ability to bookmark any linkable material such as a website, Notes documents, or Quickr content. One key aspect is the nature of social bookmarking, where an individual can subscribe to the bookmarks of other interested parties.
- Activities provide for a new task-based work management tool. An activity is a discrete work stream that can consist of one or more components and can involve many individuals. An example activity would be the creation of a book such as this. The book itself would be the activity with many active participants. Then, as content is created, reviewed, and updated, those activities can be managed in the context of the activity.
Each of these components with the exception of profiles provides the ability to enter unique tags. The tags themselves then roll up as tag clouds.
These tag clouds allow for quick information categorization and searching. Each tag cloud also provides a slider to increase or decrease the depth of information displayed. If you have not seen these before, the font size and color indicates the strength of the tag or its frequency of occurrence.
Within Notes/Domino, the main point of contact is in the area of activities and Dogear. These two items can directly connect into the Notes 8 client.
Activities are rendered as a side shelf within the client. It is available as a right-click context menu that can be used to add a Notes document (such as an e-mail) to an activity.
Dogear is available as a right-click context menu.
The architecture and installation for Lotus Connections is based on WebSphere application server. For additional information, see the Lotus Connections administration guide.