What is the future for Lotus?

This week's Lotusphere marks a big shift for IBM's Lotus collaboration software arm. But can a move into corporate social networking and web 2.0 really pay off, asks Mark Kobayashi-Hillary.

2008 marks the 15th year of Lotusphere, the annual gathering of Lotus users, enthusiasts and executives keen on shaping the software's direction over the coming year.

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This year's event took place at Disney World in Florida. As I trudged from one workshop to another through the vast Disney resort I reflected on how Lotus seems to be changing.

We all know Lotus Notes. You might even be using it on a daily basis at work. Combine Notes with Microsoft's Exchange platform and you have more than 92 per cent of corporate email systems. But there are as many detractors as enthusiasts out there.

Indeed, Microsoft took the opportunity to try and steal IBM's thunder by revealing figures this week that show more than 300 companies began migrating to Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Server and SharePoint Server in the second half of last year.

I've always found Notes clunky but some of the announcements at Lotusphere have convinced me the company is heading down some exciting new avenues this year.

Yes, Lotus announced a new partnership with SAP to start developing software together. Yes, Lotus announced a product roadmap that sees a vision of Notes as the desktop of the future. And yes, Lotus also announced improved support for open source platforms such as Ubuntu.

But the underlying - and most exciting - theme is that Lotus sees itself as the main corporate evangelist for social networking and web 2.0 technologies.

These tools are out there free on the public internet already. Facebook for networking, Flickr for image sharing, YouTube for video sharing, and a whole raft of various instant messaging and VoIP platforms.

I use these tools myself and I'm sure many of you do too. The problem many companies have right now is how to engage their employees in some form of social networking that improves their efficiency at work and offers a higher level of security than that of the social networks on the internet.

It's all very well to use an infrastructure comprising Skype and Google Mail combined with Facebook when your company consists of a handful of workers interacting online. But how can major corporations tap the benefits of social networks without suffering any of the pitfalls of using online tools?

Lotus is betting its entire future on enabling this for the corporate world. Its product suite facilitates blogging, podcasts, document sharing, collaborative team environments and discussion areas, along with social networking that can blend the internal network of employees with an external network of suppliers and customers - who can still interact through tools such as Facebook.

The Lotus vision is that all these tools should be simple enough for the general business user to configure, not just the IT team. This even applies to a product unveiled this week that allows users to easily pull mash-ups together - appropriately called Lotus Mash-ups.

Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM Lotus Software, said: "Web 2.0 for business is about empowering users with the content, social connections and mash-up tools to solve business problems."

Of course Rhodin is right. True collaboration can stimulate innovation, yet so many attempts at collaboration in the real world get bogged down in corporate politics or endless conference calls.

If Lotus can tap into the web 2.0 zeitgeist and harness the present wave of collaboration tools visible on the internet in a way that can be rolled out to corporate customers then it will be the undisputed leader of the next wave of corporate technology.

There is no question that companies will be building immense internal knowledge networks in the near future. The only question is how quickly attitudes will change so a corporate social network becomes as essential as email. It won't be long.

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is author of several books on the business of IT, including Global Services: Moving to a Level Playing Field.