IBM has distributed to partners the first external beta code of Notes/Domino Social Edition, which will allow Notes client applications to run in a browser, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

These days, IBM's collaboration software Lotus Notes has become a shadow of its former self, and the Lotusphere conference doesn't have the same pull it once did - so this year, Lotusphere will have to share the spotlight with a brand-new conference called IBM Connect.

IBM is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding Thursday. Led by American capitalist icons Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and Thomas J. Watson, Jr. until the 1970s, the company grew from a pre-World War I conglomeration of companies making tabulating machines and time-keeping devices into a globe-spanning technology behemoth that pioneered the development of electronic computers and dominated the mainframe era.

Things will get rowdier for vendors of cloud collaboration, communication and office productivity applications now that Microsoft plans to unleash a take-no-prisoners assault on the market with Office 365.

Microsoft became decidedly more social with SharePoint 2010, adding social networking tools like improved wiki and blog integration, tagging and microblogging into its SharePoint MySites feature.

Users of LotusLive Meetings can now participate in online meetings on-the-go with an iPhone app.

Just a few weeks after Microsoft pulled the plug on its Windows Essential Business Server (EBS), IBM has beefed up its own pre-integrated package for small and medium-sized businesses, called Lotus Foundations.

Sundata is now beefing up skills in Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange, as well as the Commvault portfolio, to meet the gap in business and technology offerings.

Integration of traditional on-premises Notes-based collaboration, new unified communications tools, Symphony productivity applications, content management, Web-based services and the potential to mash it all together with new-fangled development tools and social networking innovations pouring out of IBM's research labs are just a few of the challenges facing IBM's Lotus Software division chief, Bob Picciano.