Thursday 29 July 2010
Today, the computer giant is launching a new service at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Called Sametime 3D, this virtual world is mundane and workaday on purpose. Instead of exotic islands and futuristic nightclubs, IBM’s digital universe features conference tables, a gigantic appointment calendar, and a flip chart. At least one of the avatars, the computer-created characters that stand in for real people using the service, is wearing a tie. This unlikely business product is one of three new projects from the Boston-area IBM Lotus team, all designed to offer the appeal of the latest personal software ideas in office applications.
Besides the virtual world, the group’s products include Twitter-like “micro-blogging’’ as part of a Facebook-style social networking application, and a service that enables “cloud computing’’ - using remote computers connected by the Internet to do work that has traditionally been performed on a local machine. Sametime 3D enables users of Lotus’s instant-messaging client, Sametime, to set up and use virtual meeting spaces, select colleagues from their Lotus Sametime contact list, and invite them to take part in a virtual meeting. LotusLive Connections, which will be available next week, brings some trendy cloud-computing features to Lotus users, allowing them to share documents and data that are hosted “in the cloud’’ - meaning, on easily accessible Web servers. IBM’s Lotus is not alone in adding Web 2.0 features. Microsoft’s SharePoint product, which competes with Lotus, does not have virtual places or micro-blogging, but it has incorporated Web 2.0 features like blogs, wikis, and Facebook -style networking.
