Working for a firm that deals in sensitive information with clients, a recurring theme is the desire to work in the Web 2.0 world, but do so with some inherently closed walls.  For example, LinkedIn is a great tool, but is it really a contact management tool when your clients and business partners may be confidential.

IBM have released Atlas for Lotus Connections (check out Alan Lepofsky for pictures and links to the press release).   It works with your internal social profiles and build networks based on e-mail and other assets to create a graphical, LinkedIN type mesh of contacts for the internal network.

This is a big step forward for enterprises which have the size and mass to be able to leverage social tools like this internally, but can’t expose all their dealings to the external world. 

Using the API’s, a logical extension in this would be linking in CRM and Contact management systems to create a comprehensive internal marketing tool that brought together the internal and external networks that matter to large organisations. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 1:40 am and is filed under IBM, Visualisation, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.