Last week, IBM announced the official release of Lotus Connections 2.5. For me, the main two updates in this social software tool are

1) It now includes wikis -- which were oddly lacking before, yet even more oddly, they were available in the semi-competing Lotus Quickr

2) Microblogging -- which, after the explosion of Twitter's popularity this year, was hard to ignore.)

As for microblogging, I have yet to be convinced that this will be succesful "behind the firewall." If only because, even if you'd see massive adoption of microblogging within your community, so many tools have now added some sort of "status updates" that it's becoming a survival of the fittest that may well lead to mass-extinction. If everyone uses all of these tools, none will emerge as the single channel; so if you already have other software trying to take on this role, be careful.

The wikis in Connections are, predictably, still quite basic. You should consider the functionality to be a 1.0 version when compared to best-of-breed wiki products. Earlier this year, I talked to several wiki vendors (specifically the ones that offered plug-ins for Connections) and asked them whether they were worried. They weren't -- they were quite placid. And why shouldn't they be? If anything, a basic wiki service might get customers hooked on the stronger stuff. (Oddly enough, though, we still don't see government warnings on the software.)

And that's probably the bigger story here. If you want to get into Enterprise 2.0, and have very specific ideas of what kind of social software you'd want to use, and how, you should probably gloss over Connections and head straight for the blogging, messaging, or wiki tools you'd need. But if you're looking for one vendor to provide you with all the tools, including social software, don't discount IBM. Connections may not be as focused as many of the pure-play vendors or suites in our Social Software and Collaboration Report, but it's a lot more social than, say, SharePoint. (Of course, it lacks some of SharePoint's collaboration services, but that's another story...).

At any rate, Connections will now let you try microblogging and build wikis. And if you develop a thirst for more -- you can always switch to a more specific product (third party wikis are still supported), or wait for the steady improvements IBM Lotus is adding.