"Social business" is the term IBM has coined for the latest trend in collaborative solutions that today involve voice, text, data, video, and now even radio communications.

Written by Chris Smith

One of the most profound changes that computers have facilitated in the past five years lies in the area of collaborative communications. Having an application like Facebook available on the Web is creating huge shifts in political power, even inspiring revolutions in the Mideast. Such shifts are the result of people being able to share ideas and come together with single purpose. Similar changes are occurring in business. Starting slowly at first, the momentum is accelerating today as young, educated people move into the workforce and assume junior management positions. They expect to have the same tools at work that they have come to rely on for personal social networking.

Continuing its longstanding commitment to open source, IBM has announced it will take an active, supportive role in the new OpenOffice.org code base submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator. As part of the news, IBM will contribute staff resources to collaborate with the Apache community during the project's incubation period to further the Open Document Format standard.