IBM bringing Web 2.0 to corporate workers

IBM is set today to make a big push into the Web 2.0 world by unveiling a team collaboration product, social computing software and a suite of tools for building Web mashups, see Computerworld’s article here.

[…] unveiling a team collaboration product, social computing software and a suite of tools for building Web mashups.

As part of a new “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative, the IBM tools will bring popular consumer Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networks to the enterprise, […] The new software should help companies more easily brainstorm and collaborate with partners and customers about business content

[…] Lotus Quickr 8 team collaboration tool helps companies use blogs, wikis and team space templates to share business documents and access libraries through plug-ins […]

[…] IBM today also announced that Lotus Connections is now available.

The Connections tool includes Web 2.0 components like bookmarking and support for social communities

[…] In addition, IBM introduced Info 2.0, a new suite of tools for customizing and linking Web and enterprise data into mashups

While one might argue that this portfolio of tools and suites is too complex and thus distracting, I think that it’s more or less a reflection of the impossibility to design “solutions” with “one true architecture”. What’s needed is a toolbox whose contents can be flexibly combined and adapted. IBM’s efforts are no “out of the box solution” anyway, which is basically good news for consultants in the social software space – remember it’s not about technologies or tools, it’s about organizations and people.