Blogs
Speaking of blogs: the corridor discussions at Lotusphere showed that there are partly still reservations about blogging. The question still remains whether blogging would overwhelm employees in their daily work. This is an important issue when you design a blog or use blog templates with Domino-based blogging programs like BlogSphere or Bloggo

The understanding of many visitors at Lotusphere about how blogging can add value seemed mainly to be focussed on reading blogs and bringing information from one person out to others. However, this approach does not consider the benefit of commenting on blog entries and its use for the author of the blog himself.

Just last week, for instance, I received a call from a potential customer needing help on a Lotus Notes challenge integrating a certain ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. Corporate blogging is an essential element at Pentos, so I posted a discussion of the call in my blog.

The very next day, a colleague of mine commented on the blog entry, that he was working with the exact same ERP software in a project for his former employer. With traditional tools, this highly important information would most likely have been buried, never to be available to benefit the organization. Keep this in mind when you build up a blog so that not all efforts only concentrate on the main blogging feature itself.

Innovating with Web 2.0
Another big customer of Pentos just anounced the year 2007 to be an important year for innovation. To gather ideas and suggestions from their employees on how to face the upcoming challenges, the company uses a whole set of Web 2.0 applications. Here are some examples to give you ideas on how you can use Web 2.0 components for your own company.

For an instance, photos of innovation "responsibles" are displayed randomly in the company's portal, so whenever an employee enters the portal, they get to know a new member of the innovation team. With a click on the picture, the responsible's profile is displayed -- with full information on business title, location and area of accountability.

Also, employees can access blogs about the innovation efforts and have an insight on the successes of their co-workers. Collaboration software is used to collect and administer innovative ideas of the employees, using the concept of social computing. Every employee is invited to enter his or her input. Finally, the employees are provided a bookmark plattform where corporate and personal bookmarks are brought together.

Social bookmarking
At Lotusphere, IBM presented great software, Dogear, that -- among other features -- helps enterprises to use social bookmarking. The main idea about social bookmarking is to collect links on information, that others have found valuable and in the same way to find experts on certain subjects, just by the bookmarks they are using.

As every bookmark gets tagged when created, employees can pivot to their colleague's bookmark lists or profiles by browsing through tag clouds. Again, this software was made to develop your own add-ons, so you might want to take a look it!