US Bank Dumps SharePoint for Lotus … US Bank is rolling out Lotus Quickr and Connections to its 58,000 employees, and removing SharePoint. “More than 5,000 sites running Microsoft Sharepoint will be converted to Lotus, according to US Bank. Redmond was IBM’s rival bidder for handling the bank’s social tools. US Bank will also upgrade all staff systems to Lotus Notes 8.5 – from a mishmash of older versions of Notes and Domino it had accumulated through acquisitions over the years.” More
– US Bank was already a Notes/Domino customer (albeit with an old version).

Novell Teaming 2 … Novell released Version 2 of Novell Teaming, its collaboration environment. “With new features including enhanced workflows, relevance dashboards and branded workspaces, Novell Teaming rounds out the company’s suite of collaboration solutions and allows employees to generate, act on and preserve ideas and information to maximize enterprise productivity.” Available immediately. More

Phone and Email … Forrester found that American workers use the phone and email as their primary means of business communication. “Instant messaging trailed behind, with less than 25 percent of workers using the tool with some frequency. About 10 percent of workers said they use video conferencing technology at work, and only 15 percent reported using social networks at work. This is interesting, especially considering that a large number of respondents (30 percent) said they work in teams where members are in different locations, and 11 percent said they work regularly with employees of other firms. The results suggest that IT managers may be out of synch with their workforces, and as a result, they should ensure that workers have the ability to work in distributed teams. IT managers also should find out why these new communication tools are unused, the article states, as the problem could be issues with training or the technology itself.” More

IQJam in Beta … Elguji released the beta for IQJam, its question and answer social networking software. “IQJam is the perfect solution for organizations looking to capitalize on the knowledge of their employees. The concept is amazingly simple – people ask questions and other people answer them. Questions and their answers can be voted up or down. Voting allows the IQJam community to identify questions that they would like to see answered. Voting on answers helps identify the correct answer as well as eliminate ones that may be incorrect. Once the correct answer has been entered, it is marked by the user as being “answered”.” More, Product Page

Multi-Touch on Notebooks … James questions the value-add of multi-touch capabilities on notebook computers. “Regular users will find the Windows 7 touch features to be cool, at first. Executing things by gesture on the screen looks pretty special, and is something new and exciting. The excitement only lasts for a while, however; then the reality sets in that it’s not comfortable to keep reaching out to the screen and touching it. Notebook ergonomics didn’t evolve with direct screen manipulation in mind, and you soon start to feel that. You find that you quickly go back to using the touchpad and keyboard to do things like before. In other words — the novelty wears off pretty soon and it’s back to business as usual, with the touchscreen rarely touched.” More

AOL Lifestreaming … AOL announced that its lifestreaming capabilities will be released into the AIM product line on September 22. “The lifestream is AOL’s way of melding instant messaging with social streams from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube Digg, and Flickr. Initially it was just one-way, but recently AOL turned on two-way communications for Twitter and Facebook in the AIM beta so that you can update your status on those two services from within AIM. The beta is being used by about 150,000 people. On September 22, those features will be rolled out across the entire AIM user base of 20 million people.” More
– The iPhone app for AOL Lifestream is now available.

Other Items
– Samsung announced an App Store for its smartphones.
– Jive announced Market Engagement, to allow firms to take a unified approach to engaging with customers.
– A review of LotusLive Engage, for online business meetings.
– Enter your customer’s world, and help them get where they want to go.
– Yammer added Mobile Outlook add-in and a Windows Mobile application.
– The 1-9-90 rule doesn’t work in the enterprise.