Big news from IBM’s announcement of its Connections Suite, and that is the availability of Atlas, a corporate social networking and visualization tool. IBMer Ed Brill shows an illustrated example of the map of expertise in Lotus Notes using the “Net” component. Other components:

• Reach, a Visible Path-like application that helps people navigate the degrees of separation to an expert they might want to connect to.
• Find, an expertise locater that uses data from corporate blogs, organization charts, and communities to help identify experts in a particular area

Atlas complements the other applications in the Connections Suite, which has integrated blogs, social bookmarking, communities, and user profiles.

If I were in a corporation, it’s exactly what I would want. It won’t be long before it will be what users inside large corporations will expect.