IBM catching up with outside world

This morning finds me in Orlando, Florida at IBM Lotusphere, a five-day conference with nearly 7,000 attendees, where IBM's main announcement was "industry's first business-ready social software", a new platform called Connections, built on...good ol' Lotus. It may be a first for IBM, but many other vendors made this claim back in 2006. IBM also announced Lotus "Quickr," a new Web 2.0 collaborative content platform, (similar to the delayed Web 2.0 tools from competing vendor BEA), as well as a new Google Gadget integration into IBM WebSphere Portal. Mainly IBM seems to be catching up with Microsoft, who is stealing the agenda with SharePoint. IBM is a huge vendor, and buyers should remember that simplicity is tougher than usual to engineer with a large installed base to please. Finally, remember that the new products are still not released....

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ECM Standards in Perspective

In real life I don't see ECM standards proving particularly meaningful, and you should see them as a relative benefit rather than absolute must-have.