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IBM's social software is getting a lot more social. Lotus Connections, a suite of social tools designed to help businesses communicate, has expanded its offerings with the 2.5 release.

Lotus Connections 2.5 benefits with enhanced communities, wikis, improved profiles, file sharing, and more.

Communities

While the Communities feature in Lotus Connections isn't new, it's been enhanced with this release: community owners can customize the look of their communities and move widgets around on their community homepages. They can also add activities, blogs, wikis, and file sharing services to their communities. The goal is to help team members better collaborate on projects.

Discussions in communities now show up in a more conversational format using threads. Also, new statistics show which discussions are the most popular and which participants are the most active.

Wikis

With the new wiki service, users can create, view, edit, and contribute to collaborative wiki pages. This feature offers versioning, so that users can also check on a previous version and overwritten material is never lost. Users can also elect to view changes, so they know what material is new.

While the previous version of Lotus Connections was able to plug in third-party wiki tools, this is the first time the suite has had its own wiki service. Users can expect the standard collaborative editing. The tool uses CKEditor to provide rich editing tools.

Profiles

The enhanced online profiles better let employees see what their coworkers are doing. People can post status updates on tasks and comment on other users' tasks. There's new a message board feature built into profiles that lets coworkers post messages and add comments. Users can fill their profiles with their skills, accomplishments, and interests, says Jeff Schick, vice president of social software at IBM.

What's more, they can add a photo, tell people how to pronounce their name, and add a list of colleagues in a feature similar to adding friends in Facebook. Profiles become a virtual business card, letting people know about your role. With Twitter-like microblogging now built in the profiles, people can post regular updates about their status, and those updates are searchable. People can even add widgets to their profile page, such as tools for linking to Facebook and Linked in profiles.

File Sharing

Lotus Connections gains a big step forward with the new Web-based file sharing library, where users can upload and securely share documents with their coworkers. What really sets it apart, however, is the addition of social tools, such as tags, ratings, recommendations, and the ability to comment. People can add positive reinforcement, says Schick, such as telling which presentations are the most useful.

Besides these major improvements, existing services such as Home Page, Blogs, Bookmarks, and Activities all offer minor refinements.

"With Lotus Connections, we have merged document sharing and social networking capabilities to create a comprehensive collaboration platform for businesses," says Jeff Schick.

Lotus Connections 2.5 is available now, and better yet it's available in 25 languages. For more information, visit the Lotus Connections Web site.

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