This two-part series gives an overview on the new Web 2.0 features discussed at Lotusphere, displays ways to generate business value and gives ideas on how social computing can be integrated into your business applications. I'll also give you some examples of how my company has integrated these technologies into a production application.

Getting back to the user
The Lotusphere conventions over the last few years were mainly focussed on infrastructure and security. This year, Lotusphere finally put the focus back on to where business IT brings the actual benefit into the enterprise: the user.

In recent years, many applications had been developed that helped users to consume a great range of information. Portals were set up to provide content that was built by a group of editors. Information systems were developed generating all kinds of graphs and reports. Management brought strategic and operational plans to their employees.

But business is not any different than football here -- the coach can have the greatest ideas about how to get the ball behind the lines, but it's the team that actually has to run and catch the ball.

Social computing brings the tools that allow the team to interoperate and succeed together. From blogs to wikis, from realtime connection to social bookmarking, there is a whole new set of applications that enables employees to work together in an efficient way not known before, connecting people and bringing expert knowledge to the surface.

The upcoming years will deeply change our working applications as we know them. Usability and interoperability will reach a new level. Interaction between applications and users is becoming a much more critical issue. This is a huge opportunity for enterprises and a big challenge for IT managers and business application developers.

IBM promises that their new products do not have a steep learning curve for developers. This might be true concerning technical issues, but with social computing it is definitely becoming more and more important for developers to understand the needs of the users and the way the users approach the applications.