IBM had been hinting at some expanded Web 2.0 capabilities being added to its Lotus line of mail and collaboration software and unveiled it today at Lotusphere in Florida (and you thought that the primaries were the only excitement down there this time of year). The company previewed Lotus Mashups, an enterprise-oriented mashup content creation tool, and announced the next version of Lotus Connections, a new release of the communications software platform (which has been conveniently branded as "social" software... which puts me more in mind of the old-fashioned and polite way of conveying bad news on the STD front than it does of Web 2.0 spaces).

Much of the buzz around Lotusphere involved rumors that IBM would be announcing iPhone integration with the software, but we should all know by now that IBM doesn't move that fast.

Oddly enough, I was giving a talk this morning with a friend from Microsoft's Exchange group, and when someone asked about how they decided on feature development, he replied quite honestly that they surveyed the market and kept an eye on the competition, and mentioned Lotus by name... so I wonder how long it will be before we see some sort of Mashup functionality embedded in Exchange?