IBM Lotus Connections lets users grow their network of contacts by adding colleagues with a business equivalent of "friending." A new home page streams feeds from different components of Lotus Connections and shows users what's happening in their network. Widgets let you customize the main page and add links to external communities such as Facebook or custom business applications.

IBM has expanded the tagging abilities of Lotus Connections to include people tagging, so people can tag themselves or others based on a key topic or area of expertise, making it easier to find and contact people with the right expertise. Tag clouds display on the individuals' profile and throughout communities.

Lotus Connections also lets users send/receive notifications about social bookmarks, discussion forums, and integration with wiki providers Atlassian and Social Text.

"Social networking is the new frontier in business collaboration," said Jeff Schick, IBM vice president of social software. "From the business-minded projects of IBM Researchers, to our expertise in Web 2.0, Lotus Connections is the perfect blend of business-ready tools and Web 2.0 innovations."

A complimentary offering to Lotus Connections, Atlas is a corporate social networking visualization and analysis tool. Atlas has four Web 2.0 components designed to help users see important connections and relationships between groups, as well as navigate their networks: My Net, Find, Reach, and Net. Users can add new Atlas widgets to their home page to show them how they're linked to someone, or suggest communities or blogs people like them are participating in.

Lotus Connections 2.0 is available in 23 languages. It costs US$110 per user for a one-time perpetual license. Businesses can purchase the profiles or activities component of Lotus Connections for US$55 per user for a perpetual license.

Atlas 2.0 is available via services engagements through IBM Software Services for Lotus.