IBM releases social collaboration tool Verse

IBM has announced its new ‘freemium’ social collaboration Verse that uses built-in analytics to retrieve information from a range of services.  

Verse integrates email, meetings, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging and social updates through a single collaboration environment.

It features ‘faceted search’ which enables users to retrieve information they’re seeking across all the types of content within their email.

Verse’s built-in analytics provide an ‘at-a-glance’ view that surfaces an individual’s most critical actions for the day.

By learning unique employee preferences and priorities over time, it provides instant context about a given project as well as the people and teams collaborating on it.

“The convergence of analytics, cloud, social and mobile technologies is not just impacting our personal lives, it’s profoundly changing how we work,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, IBM Information and Analytics Group.  “These forces are reshaping how people make decisions, create and share new ideas and collaborate across teams to get work done.  With IBM Verse, we challenged our design teams to use analytics to completely reimagine the social collaboration experience to focus on engaging people and driving outcomes, not managing messages and inboxes.”

Clients using IBM Verse will also have the future option to embed a Watson feature into their collaboration environment, which enables users to query Watson on a given topic and receive a direct reply with answers ranked by degree of confidence.

A beta release of the new offering will be available to select clients and partners in November 2014.  A freemium version delivered via the IBM Cloud Marketplace will be available in the first quarter of 2015.

Verse will also be offered as an app for both iOS and Android to ensure mobile users have the same experiences on the go as they do on their PCs.