My Net provides a visual indication of the hubs among topic experts and informal groups that develop while working on similar projects. With it, users can find communication gaps or bottle-necks and manage skills across the organization. My Net offers similar capabilities for a user's personal network.

Reach is a social software dashboard feature, which can help users navigate the degrees of separation between themselves and a colleague. The dashboard shows users the shortest path to reach an expert and ranks the expert based on the level of interaction across the network.

Find builds on Lotus Connections expertise capabilities by taking searches beyond the corporate directory to include results based on social data such as reporting structures, blogs, and communities. Users can customize search criteria to refine the search based on location, corporate structure, or degrees of separation. Results are sorted based on the collaborative ranking assigned to a topic expert.

"When you apply social software to business processes the ability to see and understand the relationships between groups, people, and information is critical," said Jeff Schick, IBM Lotus vice president of social software. "Atlas helps workers navigate their social networks and use these relationships to rally around ideas and projects instead or organization charts helping speed decision making and improve efficiency."

Atlas is designed to work with IBM Lotus Connections an integrated enterprise social software platform. Lotus Connections 1.0.2 features:

• Support for operating systems such as SUSE Linux, browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 2.0, and directories such as Microsoft Active Directory.
• Plug-ins for IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Explorer, and IBM WebSphere Portal.
• An API based on the REST and Atom standards let other applications use the profiles, community, bookmarking, blogging, and activity services of Lotus Connections.