October 16, 2007

Turning Your Web Site Into A Communication and Collaboration Hub

The basic corporate web site of 5 years ago is not going to cut it today. If your business is an a trajectory of growth, it's important that you consider how to maximize your web site as a new communication vehicle for your employees, partners and customers.

IBM announced at Collaboration Summit that it will take features of Lotus and give end-users simple tools from within a company's website to create, connect and share content, plus get access to communities resources and contacts through professional networking tools.

"Our simple approach of a single, standards based, portal platform, and easy to integrate accelerators is giving customers the maximum flexibility and choice to address their business needs and are making portals the irresistible choice for advance web user interactions, " said Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and interaction services.

IBM's use of accelerators enable its customers to quickly ramp up and add additional functionality to their portal based web sites.

Be it collaboration, content or enterprise suites supporting multi portal sites, IBM has a solution.

Get more information here.

There are so many things you can do by making your web site a communication hub.

For example, instead of emailing employees and collecting information via email, a portal based web site means your partners/contractors can use your web site to submit photos of their projects as they are completed. Your internal managers can comment on the photos, post them and make them available to your entire sales force for further review or noting.

Portals turn a static web site from a one dimensional content site into a hub for a variety of dynamic communication opportunities.

Competing head to head with IBM's portal moves is Microsoft SharePoint, which offers similar functionality. An IBM spokesperson noted that IBM's offering is much more extensive than Microsoft's. My guess is that at the end of the day your business needs to decide which platform it wants to work with and hire developers who can create a portal for your business.

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