Lotus Connections is the IBM enterprise 2.0 platform with a number of social media features: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), and Activities
to organize your work and integrate with your colleagues. The idea with Activities is to enable what IBM calls Activity Centric Collaboration. The goal is to organize work around the activities people do rather than the tools they use. This is a common theme in enterprise 2.0 tools. My first introduction to what we eventually called knowledge management was creating activity-based tools in Visual Basic in 1993. I have been encouraged to see this concept reach maturity with today’s tools. I was introduced to IBM’s approach to the concept in 2005 through a press briefing. It was called Unified Activity Management then. It was still experimental then. Now the concept is fully integrated into their enterprise 2.0 offering in a functional manner.

Here is the first in a series of demo videos on Connections. This video “focuses on the Activities service, and it goes into some of the new features we’re releasing in the next version of Activities! You can also use this and future videos as training tools on how to get started and learn to use new features.” This is a nice example of video blogs to combine dialog with pictures to provide a more comprehensive message. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing out the video through our Facebook connection