IBM unveils Lotus Mashups

New tool is designed to empower non-technical staff

IBM has unveiled a new commercial mashup maker, Lotus Mashups, designed to give non-technical users an easy way to create enterprise mashups without the support of their IT team.

A browser-based tool which allow users to easily assemble new mashups and a catalogue supply of widgets is planned to get the ecosystem started. Users can then create an environment based on widgets and also put the widgets on a server that others can build on, said the firm.

The launch of Mashups can be seen as another step in the firms composite applications strategy, whereby business users can now create widgets that access enterprise systems with builder tools.

IBM further announced a new version of Lotus Connections in the Web 2.0 space, intended to be easier to customise than the earlier version, with a new homepage based on Lotus mashup technology.

Jeff Schick, Lotus social computing software vice president, said, “As we employed version one, we found that people wanted to customise the capability in Connections by modifying the profile information and the community and integrating an extensive set of services.”

In addition, Lotus Connections 2.0 will allow users to create widgets to connect to other social networks, and enhancements are being made to the community component of Lotus Connections to integrate wiki services from Quickr, SocialText and Atlassian.

IBM announced updates to Quickr intended to bring Quickr technology in line with the rest of the portfolio. Quickr 8.1 will accelerate personal file sharing, including content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs and wikis. Steps are also being been made by the firm to connect Quickr with FileNet P8 and IBM content manager.

During a Lotusphere keynote, IBM announced its strategy to unlock the knowledge of workers in ways unlike that which traditional knowledge management systems aim to do.

“Rather than focussing on command and control models, we need to give workers more power to socialise,” said Michael Rhodin, Lotus Software general manager.

In line with these announcements, Research In Motion previewed BlackBerry Client for Lotus Connections. The new software application will run on BlackBerry smartphones and provide user’s access to Lotus Connections, while Voltage Security announced Voltage SecureFile for Quickr. SecureFile will bring information encryption to documents in the Lotus environment.