Rather than getting people to document what they know, and add keywords and search to that, and be forced to bring it all into one space (or using Discovery to collate it and then organising a taxonomy around it), Connections allows people to build the knowledge as they work, by blogging, tagging useful information, adding items to activities and being brought together as a community by those activities, generating a folksonomy instead (yep, new buzzword -- go see Wikipedia).

This is KM that will just happen as people work, rather than something that is overlaid over what they do. And this time we already know it works, because it's based on so much that is already in use on the Internet in directly social contexts. The major difference is that everyone in a Connections world is authenticated and identified, not just for access control and security but also because the communities have a direct purpose and so the people need to be identifiable to deliver best value.

But Connections won't just be its own island. You can get to Activites from the Notes 8 client, and add items from Notes to Activities, or start new ones. You can get to Dogear lists in Portal and Notes, and work with them there. And like everything else, it's standards based, with all the integration and interoperability that brings. It will be around after mid-year.

WebSphere Portal Express 6.0
Lastly in our firehose of coverage is WebSphere Portal Express 6.0. This also is an evolutionary release of Portal with new features, rather than a complete makeover. Aimed at smaller companies, it offers a similar range of facilities to Quickr -- document management, Web content management and so on. It will include Lotus Component Designer as an application development tool hat has been specifically designed to appeal to existing Domino Designer users, via a similar look and feel.

Now, one thing I'm going to be interested to see is how the interplay of the rich, Eclipse/Expeditor client against browsers works out. Notes has this new componentised client and still has the Domino HTTP server. The client was put forward by Ambuj Goyal as the solution to the fact that browsers stink -- and while Web 2.0 has made them a little less smelly, they still whiff quite a bit.

Given that we now (or soon will have) this new client, while at the same time the browser has Web 2.0, it will be interesting to see if the new client arrests the move to do everything in a browser, even though, at not inconsiderable development expense, browser applications are much more capable than they are.