On Wednesday at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., the company showed its Lotus Mashups application and updated versions of Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr 8.1.

A Trend Toward Mashups

First previewed last fall, Lotus Mashups allows nontechnical users to "mashup," or combine, various data in ad hoc ways. Using a browser, out-of-the-box widgets, a catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups, and a builder for accessing enterprise systems, Lotus Mashups enables what the company described as visualizations that can blend enterprise and Web-based data "to solve real business problems."

"We're seeing a real trend happening," said Oliver Young, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester. He noted that Microsoft , Yahoo, Google and other companies have also been releasing mashup tools for consumers and businesses, and now "a lot of companies are seeing value in mashups."

The value, Young said, is in enabling knowledge workers to create their own dashboards, where "they can see lots of different data sources in one view." Lotus Mashups is interesting, he said, in that it enables the user to connect the portlets (views), so that data changes in one portlet affect the data in another.

For many people, mashups mean data overlays on maps, such as all the pizza shops in your city overlaid on a Google map. Young noted that this is only one type of mashup, and that the term means taking multiple data sources and combining them so they can be viewed at the same time.

Eventually, he predicted, we're going to see mashup tools widely adopted, because "the business value is tremendous," but he expects that won't happen for at least a year.

Social Networking for Business

Young pointed out that social-networking tools for business, such as Lotus Connections, have evolved more quickly than mashups. IBM said Lotus Connections, first released at last year's Lotusphere, is already in use by hundreds of businesses.

In the new version of Connections, the home page incorporates Lotus mashup technology to aggregate, filter and display various streams of data from the social network into a customizable view. Users can, for instance, see what has changed across their network and search for information.

The updated Connections also has enhanced discussion forums, interlinked wiki services, integrated unified communications and widgets that can connect to social networks like LinkedIn.

Young said Connections also now allows companies to see how information flows in the organization -- by seeing who is reading what, who is sharing tags, and so on. "For end users," he admitted, "this kind of monitoring may be a little scary, but for companies, seeing what the real relationships are in an organization, not just the organization chart, can be useful."

Such tools are not only helping make business relationships more fluid, but are also helping blur the line between social networking and collaboration . One example is IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1. It is a collaboration environment for teams working together, and new features include content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs, wikis and other "connectors" for sharing information.