Lotusphere 2009: IBM Attempts The Tightrope Of Open Collaboration Within Large Enterprise

Main announcements at Lotusphere 2009 this morning: IBM highlighted partnerships with LinkedIn , TripIt, Skype, and Salesforce.com. On the internal side, the Notes crew demo'd very functional Blackberry integration, voice chat integrated within Notes, and a very nice browser-based UI. The emphasis was clearly on social computing and collaboration--including the new Lotus Live --IBM's latest SaaS effort. Quite timely, given my controversial post on Lotus Notes and the Web 2.0 world. Clearly, IBM recognizes the growth of social collaboration, and they're trying to funnel that through the front door--yes, you can use Flickr, Skype, etc--but everything is designed to happen within the context of the Notes platform.