Why use social applications as the mechanism for fostering collaboration and communications?

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By mining employee business communications and tapping into corporate email, calendaring, social networks, phone systems and collaboration systems, BranchIt serves as a corporate social search engine.

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Powering this vision is a suite of IBM products such as Lotus Notes for email, contacts, and calendaring, Lotus Connections, the social networking environment, Lotus Quickr, the document repository, and Lotus Sametime for unified communications and real time collaboration such as web conferencing and instant messaging.

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