Connections
There's a set of new capabilities coming in Connections 2.5. Joining the existing five Connections services (Activities, Dogear, Blogs, Profiles and Communities) will be a Wiki service and a Personal File Sharing service. These two new functions will be shared with Quickr, too. I speculate here that as Connections is a J2EE application for WebSphere, that these two will appear first, and possibly only, in Quickr for Websphere, too.

The existing services do get some upgrades. The Homepage can now be customized rather more, including adding a summary of latest updates. Communities has the most changes. You'll be able to add the new wiki and file sharing services to communities as you please, and there are new features such as a "posting wall" and micro-blogging, as well as threading being added to forums.

There are some "tweaks" to the install, better performance is promised, and better configuration, which to my mind can't really come too soon. And you'll be able to use it from iPhone and Nokia/Symbian device browsers as well as from BlackBerries.

Application vendors are getting into using Connections as part of their products and services. As expected, the Lotusphere online site ran Connections, and a number of partners are offering extensions and integrations into the product, too.

Going forward, there are plans to enable Connections to be more easily, but still securely, used from outside the firewall. We've already seen that you can now configure Connections to hide email addresses. I would speculate that configuring this will be easier, and maybe they'll even come up with some way that it can display them inside the firewall but not outside.

Taking Connections out to customers, suppliers and partners will push competitive and responsiveness and should enable businesses to reduce costs, particularly by improving their ability to get things right, first time. Just the sorts of thing that businesses need right now, too.

Quickr
Quickr 8.2 is to be a Domino rather than a WebSphere release. It should bring some offline support, enabling you to take the library part of a place offline, work on the documents, and then synchronize it back when you have a connection again - complete with some document conflict support should you have worked on the same document as one another member of your team.