Here is a personal example: my wife and I have a wonderful son together, but as my wife is originally from Albuquerue, New Mexico, and we live in Germany, her family gets to see him only twice a year. However, we have been using Skype to make free overseas calls and do video conferencing, so her family was able to listen to our sons first words and to watch him doing his first steps.

Isn't it amazing times that we live in? So why not use these great opportunities and awesome features for our businesses, too?

This is the second in a 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. Let's see where this all takes us.

Realtime collaboration
With IBM's Sametime 7.5, you, as an IT manager or a developer, can help your company to take advantage of realtime collaboration, connect the company's employees, provide an excellent tool for virtual teams and bring experts together. The social computing features of Sametime 7.5 are huge.

The software shows which experts in the enterprise are currently available; they can instantly start a chat or video conference and share project documents. But being billed as an open application, this still is not where realtime collaboration ends. My company, Pentos, used the great plug-in and API features that come with Sametime 7.5 for a full Skype integration, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


IBM Sametime 7.5 offers great opportunities to integrate plug-ins. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Since this is a live application, I had to blur out all the contacts. I know you understand. At one glance you can now see in just one platform not only your Sametime contacts but also all of your Skype partners and start a quick chat directly from within Sametime. Use your creativity: there are uncountable opportunities to develop plug-ins and integrate existing software into Sametime, like showing the location of a contact on GoogleMap or providing links to corporate blogs. [Picture: