Atlas for Lotus Connections

Well a couple of mail server crashes made me late to this party, but better late then never.  Today IBM announced Atlas for Lotus Connections, consisting of these components

1. Net / My Net – Net displays visually different groups that have formed based on projects, activities, communities, areas of expertise and other commonalities. My Net is similar but used to give a visual representation of your network, and it would appear this uses not only data from Lotus Connections, but data from e-mail and instant messaging as well to depict your connections graphically. Alan Lepofsky has some screen shots here.
2. Reach – graphically depicts the shortest path between yourself and a person to reach, or in other words this example from the press release
   

   For example, Jim needs more information on compliance regulations in the financial services industry to close an important deal. His social dashboard shows him that Barb is an expert in compliance and is active in various communities. Jim can also see that his teammate Matthew reports to Denise, who co-authors a blog on compliance regulations with Barb. By using his social network Jim can connect with Barb faster to get the information he needs to close the deal.

3. Find – using the data in Lotus Connections extends search to find people based on almost any factor, reporting structure, community memberships, locations and more. Towards the bottom of the press release comes the real catch to Atlas
   

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

   thats right it is not a product you can buy rather a services engagement  from ISSL, Chris, among others are not happy about it being offered as a service not a product.  Atlas certainly would be a nice complement to Lotus Connections, and should it be a product rather then a service? Yes I would agree, but in reading various posts on Atlas here is the key piece of information I found in  the sync.rono.us blogs coverage of the Atlas announcement after Chris and Stuart comment on it being an ISSL asset Chris Lamb who is the senior product manager answers them with this comment

   So the reason that it is a service offering and not just part of Lotus Connections is that there is a lot of customization work that can be done: deciding on the weighting of the data sources, how and where you want the visualization to appear, pulling in data from other sources, etc. Once we we some deployment patterns, we will be able to set default values and configurations that customers expect with an off the shelf product.

   So it sounds like this will become a product, ,but it needs some work before it is something a customer can install and run with out of the box.   Finally Chris Lamb was interviewed by Inforworld, and leaves some interesting teasers for Lotusphere announcements around sharing of profile data between different social networks

   A growing number of people use multiple networks and would like to easily move their profile data between them. Without providing specifics, Lamb said IBM is moving to address the problem.  “That’s something that we’re looking at, how we aggregate that,” he said. “There will be some announcements around the Lotusphere time frame.”

   This sounds very similar to IBM’s announcement with Second Life on moving personas between virtual worlds, but I suspect profile data will be easier to exchange then Second Life avatars.