Not shrugging at Atlas
December 18 2007
News from the Lotus Connections team...
IBM announced the availability today of a new corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool aimed at helping users better navigate their personal and corporate social networks.Pretty cool stuff. I poked around with the internal implementation yesterday, and when I searched for experts, for example, I was able to find a convenient partner in my network...
IBM's Atlas for Lotus Connections will allow users to identify key experts in a company on specific topics, see how those people are connected and allow employees to seek new contacts through those they have already connected to in the Lotus Connections social networks, IBM said. Atlas is designed to work with Lotus Connections, a set of tools to build social networks that IBM launched in June.
Perhaps more interesting is the visualization of an expertise network around "Lotus Notes"...that's me in the red box...
More details on Atlas are available in the IBM press release as well as on the Connections team blog.
Media coverage...
Computerworld: IBM's Atlas adds visualization tools to social networks at work > (Quoted above)
eWeek: Visualize social networks with IBM's Atlas >
Post a Comment
- 2
Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 12/18/2007 3:12:09 PM
My indie consulting company from a few years back is called: d'Anconia Industries. ;-)
- 3
Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/18/2007 4:51:42 PM
@1 Chris Lamb has posted a response to your comment on the Synch.rono.us Connections team blog (see link in original posting)
- 4
Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 12/18/2007 5:17:41 PM
@3 Ed: Chris's answer reveals a very old school corporate software industry approach, rather than an agile, collaborative Web 2.0 model that would seem more appropriate (to me, anyhow) given the product category we're talking about.
- 5
Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 12/18/2007 5:23:38 PM
By the way, I should add that I'm a little freaked out to see this sort of stuff coming out these days. I had a professor who was doing social network analysis back twenty-cough-cough years ago, and he produced lots of maps like this -- without pictures, pure ASCII printing. Old academic stuff suddenly coming to life as the new cool tool for business.
- 6
Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 12/18/2007 10:16:16 PM
Cool! Funny too, my old art school friends would love this, especilly if you can manipulate the "threads".
Chris is partially right of course. We have to pay for what is free in many places?
However I can see the value in it for large companies, no question, what is it worth to them is a better question.
I have a client I think would be interested in this as a new solution to a problem they have with EXTERNAL customers.
The question is how will this work in a CRM format rather than an internal format?
Or will this be open for outside the firewall clients who interact with an organization?
- 7
Stu Downes http://www.sdownes.co.uk | 12/19/2007 2:31:21 AM
Ed, Thanks for the visualisation. This is one of the great blog powers is the ability to show information much quicker than it appears on the internet, I was surprised that there was nothing other than the press release on lotus.com / ibm.com - many thanks Ed!
- 8
Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 12/19/2007 7:56:54 AM
If you're interested in visualizations like this you should check out the work done by Marcos Weskamp { Link } .
- 9
Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 12/19/2007 8:06:42 AM
@7 - Ed is showing one of the types of visualizations. If you'd like to see another, I blogged { Link } about the "My Net" feature.
- 10
Chris Miller http://www.IdoNotes.com | 12/19/2007 9:44:44 AM
@3 Thanks Ed, I headed over there to see him comments.
- 11
Jess stratton http://www.mattandjess.net | 12/20/2007 8:50:41 AM
Ha! I looked at that a little too quickly. Where it says "Your social paths to reach", I read it as: "your sociopaths..."
Whoops. ;-)
I love the idea but had issues with this only being available under the ISS Asset banner. There are far too many free products that offer this in social networking not to have it as a basic part of Connections, which in comparison has a bland interface.
{ Link }
I like the ideas of what it offers, lets just get them to offer it free :-)