LinkedIn collaborates with IBM Lotus products
Jinfo Blog

22nd January 2009

By Penny Crossland

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At its annual Lotosphere conference, http://digbig.com/4ydrd IBM this week announced a partnership with professional networking site LinkedIn, which will integrate the functionality and networking capabilities of LinkedIn with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and Lotus Live. With the integration, members of the networking site will be able to track the profiles of their email contacts via a network updates feed and will have access to LinkedIn profiles from Lotus mail and applications. As part of the collaboration LinkedIn will also integrate with Lotus’ business-based social networking application, Lotus Connections http://digbig.com/4ydre , an internal social networking product for businesses. Users of the new LotusLive cloud-based service http://digbig.com/4ydrf will be able to collaborate with LinkedIn’s public professional network using services like file sharing and real-time web conferencing. The advantage to companies integrating social networking into their work practices is that enterprise productivity increases through the sharing of ideas and expertise. Employees will be able to connect with people outside work to get jobs done. LinkedIn sees the IBM collaboration as a step towards becoming the future intranet of choice for corporations. However, an issue that has not been addressed in the press releases accompanying the partnership announcement is that of confidentiality. Will businesses be happy to let employees discuss work matters with outside contacts? This is not the first time LinkedIn has collaborated with companies to provide information on business contacts. It collaborates with Xobni (http://www.xobni.com), a service that searches for and organises Outlook email, providing Xobni’s users with professional profile information for email contacts.

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