At this week’s Lotusphere IBM introduced “Project Vulcan“, it’s road-map for integrating public and private collaboration and social communities into an extensible set of user interfaces. Ed Brill notes that Vulcan “is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going.” Vulcan continues a trend by IBM to merge Notes into public social networks, highlighted by last year’s announcement of LinkedIn integration with Notes.

IBM’s announcement, coupled with Cisco’s recent introduction of public social hooks into its Enterprise Collaboration Platform demonstrate a continued convergence of public and private social networks. These moves highlight the reality that social network such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are increasingly used for legitimate business purposes rather than for entertainment or catching up with friends and family, but they also raise alarms for those responsible for governance, compliance, and security. I expect that over the next year we’ll see a continued battle between those responsible for information protection and those looking to improve collaboration. Vendors can help their odds of success by addressing compliance concerns up front.

IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.

We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.

“Video” was king at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as Skype and Cisco brought out new products designed to make it easier for folks to participate in high-quality video conferences from the comfort of their living room. But does video conferencing, which requires full attention, fit with the trends we’re seeing in social applications toward continuous partial communications using a variety of channels, with a variety of participants engaging in multiple simultaneous conversations? Joel Stein at TIME has an interesting take, arguing that people would rather TiVo their lives and shift between various channels and conversations than commit to a video conference. Yes, video conferencing is becoming indispensable in business communications, but will it become an integral part of social communications?

Bill Pray blogged today on the Supreme Court’s decision to take on a case involving the privacy rights of an employee’s use of a government-provided mobile device for personal text messaging. This case further highlights the growing concerns around privacy and compliance as companies embrace emerging communications applications. In almost every conversation I’ve had with end-user organizations the topic of compliance is front and center as they evaluate tools such as SMS, Instant Messaging, Microblogging, and social computing platforms. Our recent SRO session at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston explored many of these issues as well. Bottom line is that its wise to involve your governance and compliance officers early on in as you develop your enterprise 2.0 strategy.

At last week’s Collaboration Summit Cisco introduced WebEx Mail, a hosted service built upon its PostPath acquisition. WebEx Mail represents Cisco’s first foray into a market dominated by Microsoft and IBM, with emerging hosted challengers including Google, Zoho (as well as Microsoft and IBM’s own hosted offerings) and Zimbra’s on-premise server. Like other hosted offerings, Cisco bundles security services such as spam and virus filtering into its service. WebEx Mail offers an intriguing option for current Microsoft Exchange shops, but also has some limitations that prospective buyers ought to be aware as they conduct their evaluation.

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Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….

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In case you missed it, Cisco took the wraps off its social/collaboration strategy yesterday at its Collaboration Summit (#ciscocollab) summit in San Francisco. Cisco fired a salvo deep into the territory of Microsoft and IBM Lotus (and to a lesser extent, Google) with its own suite of products covering messaging and social computing. Cisco also introduced numerous video and real-time collaboration products designed to broaden access to its telepresence suite, mate video with WebEx web conferencing, and easily enable inter-company collaboration.

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Notable about next months Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco is that it is co-located with VoiceCon, a long-running show focused on telephony that for many years was the place to go to learn about digital phone systems.

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This week Google finally distributed a limited set of invites to its Wave collaboration application. Wave represents a fundamental re-thinking of the way people collaborate and is designed to break the death-grip e-mail still has on communications.

Wave has come up a lot in recent conversations with vendors and end-users alike. Vendors are concerned that Google will emerge as a strong competitor in the unified communications and collaboration market, while enterprise IT architects are still reluctant to embrace Google as an alternative to IBM Lotus and Microsoft, but are enticed by Google’s approach to integrating real-time and non-real-time collaboration.

I tend to think the real impact of Wave won’t be as much a mass adoption by knowledge workers as it will drive new features and innovations to applications including Notes and Outlook. Just as Skype introduced the world to UC, perhaps Wave will do the same for a new paradigm for collaboration.

A couple of interesting data points:

• A new Pew study notes that the Interent isn’t really changing who participates in politics, but Pew notes that blogs and social networking sites are seeing growing political activity.
• Brendan Nyhan on his blog points to efforts underway to leverage social computing to improve political polling

There’s all sorts of implications here from the Enterprise 2.0 perspective, not only the potential to use social computing for data gathering, but also the potential risks of employees using their public social networks to promote political views that may be contrary to their employer.
I’m curious to hear if any companies are implementing any guidelines on how employees use their personal social networks?