In case you interested in the technical foundations of the new Lotus Connections product, James Snell has posted some great facts and figures about the scale of IBM’s internal deployment of blogs, bookmarks, etc.
Here are some numbers: Our BlogCentral environment supports 25k+ registered users with over 3k+ “active” blogs. There are over 100k posts and comments with over 10k+ unique tags. Our dogear server has over 200k+ distinct bookmarks to resources both inside and outside the firewall and is generally more reliable at providing quick access to important resources than our Intranet search servers. Our activities server has over 11k activities with 69k+ entries and has 35k+ registered users.
The point is, this stuff has been road tested.
The more important angle of James’ post is that the adoption of these technologies has been word-of-mouth and organic – not mandated. I’m pretty proud to have been one of the early adopters and advocates. I started using the internal blogs, wikis and podcasts, and discovered I had a much stronger network of contacts. As a result, I told my team. Not everyone has been a convert, and I wouldn’t have expected them to be. However, I think people do recognise how useful these tools can be, given the right amount of time and attention.
[ sorry for the Snell mini-linkathon, but as one of the key players, he’s got some useful information over there 🙂 ]
