So you love Connections. And you love Sametime. Now you can both in one package, with much more! Today, we announced the electronic availability of the IBM Connections Suite. The Connections Suite gives you one single package that includes:
IBM Connections 3.0.1
IBM Sametime Advanced 8.5.2
IBM Sametime Unified Telephony Lite Client 8.5.2
IBM FileNet Content Manager 5.1 (restricted license)
IBM Quickr Connectors
Luis posted some great demo videos and information in his blog this morning. I highly recommend you check them out. Here is one of his videos and links to all of them:
Have you heard about the new IBM Connections 101 education site? If you haven't seen it yet, Gabriella Davis and Paul Mooney launched Connections 101 - a site aimed at helping people set up an IBM Connections environment from scratch, especially those with a Domino background or who have never worked with WebSphere. I really like how they are focusing on educating people about the whys, not just the whats. This is really helpful to people who are unfamiliar with the application server, database, and other underlying technology and want to know more about it, but really want to know how it practically applies to their IBM Connections installation - for example, what's a node, what's a cell, why do you need to know that. Here is a brand new interview from the Taking Notes Podcast with Gab and Paul about their site
This tutorial shares information on creating embedded experiences, which allow you to embed your app or other apps into various IBM collaboration solutions. There is some great information on how to create an embedded experience on our product wiki. Here's a snapshot of what's available and links to the resources.
An embedded experience is a way for applications to embed content into other applications and let users interact dynamically with that content directly in context without having to switch to another application.
Embedded experiences eliminate the hassle of constantly switching windows, opening applications, and authenticating with multiple sites and services. This constant switching causes users to lose focus on their tasks, which decreases their levels of productivity. If users can access, filter, and respond to most of their work processes from a stream of activities in a single interface, they can manage their work more effectively.
I wanted to share the effectiveness of Connections Activities in running a small project and, as a part of that, managing meetings and actions from meetings.
I held a meeting this morning and a number of team members couldn't attend because of conflicts or the late notice. At the end of the day, eight hours after the meeting ended, most of the ToDos have been completed already, including those assigned to people who did not attend the meeting! In addition to the 'ToDo' items explicitly checked off in the Activity, additional actions have already been completed as team members updated entries elsewhere in the Activity (again, including contributions from team members who did not attend the meeting).
Activities can really help increase the responsiveness of a team -- most of the actions assigned in the meeting were completed or discussed by the end of the day, and everyone on the extended team in the Activity can easily see what we have accomplished today. Communicating actions to team members who had critical information but did not attend the meeting was really key! This is another example of the the way Activities helps Teams work together better by tracking meetings and action items that can be assigned, discussed, and completed.
Want to learn more about IBM Connections Activities? Check out this video.
Today we have a special guest author who you are likely familiar with. Kathryn Corey who joined the IBM Social Software Product Management team as an Offering Manager in January of this year. Kathryn has been with IBM for almost 16 years and has had a variety of roles in Graphic Services, Worldwide Sales Operations and most recently as a User Experience Manager working with the teams responsible for Notes and Domino, Sametime, Portal and IBM Connections Mail. Here are some of her favorite features and thoughts on IBM Connections 3.x.
Kathryn, Can you tell us what your favorite features in Connections are? >> Well of course given my background the first thing I would have to say is the clean and easy to use user interface. I find the uncluttered and streamlined nature of the interface to be helpful in allowing me to work quickly and effective in Connections, particularly with profiles. In Profiles 3.0.1 connecting to the Sametime Web Client to provide the ability to start chats right away from Profiles and the Business Card is another feature I find that makes me more efficient. A feature I use consistently is the ability to have a sub community within a community that is private and secure, so I can work on projects and information in a secure private space before it is ready to be shared more broadly. I also find Activities to be valuable, to me it is a built-in project management tool. Being able to have a team work collectively on a project and use Activities to easily assign and track the progress of the work items makes keeping track of the multitude of projects we are all assigned to easy and manageable.
How does Connections help you get your job done? >> In transitioning from my UX role to my Offering Manager role, I found that Connections communities helped to get me up to speed faster. I got to know the people on my new team, the procedures and pertinent information about my new role through the team's community. I was able to follow other communities to start to be posted on information and learn more content I needed to know, thus making me productive more quickly. Using Files has helped me to get my job done faster and more efficiently, I no longer have large file attachments clogging up my email creating quota issues that I have to stop my work and deal with, so I can access files I need for a project. Other advantages to using Files is that there is not any lag time for other members of the team I am working with in accessing my files or in me accessing their files. After I post my files, I can quickly notify team members without having to navigate to any other window or application. The IBM Connections 3.0.1 Files plug-in for Lotus Notes is a tool that makes it easy for me to track and post project information and requests that originated in Notes. Here is a link to the Files plug-in for Lotus Notes: https://greenhouse.lotus.com/plugins/plugincatalog.nsf/assetDetails.xsp?action=editDocument&documentId·25B33D4CFB3C61852577B60056A406
Is there anything else you would like to share about IBM Connections? >> I would like to re-share two videos that I found powerful about Connections and Social Software.
The first video is from Electrolux, which is an interview with the Director On Line Employee Engagement discussing the implementation of Connections. I found the point about the impact Connections had on change management by inviting the employees into the dialog to be a powerful way in which Connections is helping to solve complex business issues.
This video is of Rheinmetall a customer in Germany that implemented Connections, Quickr, Sametime and Lotus Notes. The company's challenge was to communicate over boarders and combine skills worldwide. This video summed up the value of these products working together to solve that challenge and highlighted the advantages to setting up both internal and external environments.
Doing a set of user surveys recently, with college students - I learned this interesting item, something I've kind of "sought" in my designs and it was very exciting to hear it verbalized.
In this test, one of the questions asked was, what 2 or 3 software applications do you use the most? When I asked a small group of students, they all came back with the same answer - Microsoft Office.
Now, I prodded them a little and asked, do they use Office more frequently than say, they use, Facebook?
Instantly everyone in the group said, no, they used Facebook a lot more than Office. When I asked do they use SMS Texting more than Facebook, again, a resounding, yes, they text considerably more than they use Facebook.
Here's what I culled from this little survey;
1. Thinking about something as a "Software Application" is old school - an old school notion of a thing I as a user have to comprehend, and engage with.
2. Well designed software interfaces become natural and they are extensions of people, and are only thought of in terms of what value users get from them.
3. Software Application == Computer Interface
4. Useful applications == the high powered computing device that is chained to my person, the smartphone
5. Really successful design patterns focus exclusively on the value and use people get from them and suppress the configuration, architecture and hardware demands - and pick intelligent defaults, settings along with innate function to self-regulate. In effect automating all of the administration so that the prime functional value is all people have to deal with.
As we start planning for future releases of IBM Connections, we wanted to understand how users, for example, are using Wikis to ensure that we are investing in the right areas. Just like it doesn't make sense to invest in Internet Explorer 6 these days, we want to know how users are leveraging the editors in the Wikis component of IBM Connections.
Currently, we support 3 editors in Wikis: Rich Text Editor, HTML Editor, and Wiki Text Editor. The three approaches to editing content are very different from each other and conflict at a fundamental level. Rich text editing and HTML editing gives users free control over their styling and formatting whereas wiki text is specifically designed to restrict this freedom in preference for consistent document semantics. Since Wikis allows one page to be edited in three different formats, a conversion process must take place. Converting from wiki text to rich text is relatively easy since wiki text is much less expressive than rich text (HTML). Converting from rich text to wiki text is a very different problem. A lot of content can be expressed in HTML that cannot be expressed in wiki text.
Wikis currently allows for lossless conversion from rich text to wiki text by escaping anything that cannot be converted and leaving it in a HTML form, embedded within the wiki text. A caveat of this is that the wiki text content becomes less useful as more HTML is escaped within it. The task of maintaining this wiki conversion is very expensive and difficult and we would like to spend the development time on nicer new features ;-)
We'd like to know what you think and how the community is using wiki text in IBM Connections Wikis right now. And while we are at it, it would be good to know what would be your top feature request for Wikis.
Please answer the survey below:
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.
We are always interested in highlighting what our partners are doing in terms of building applications. Blogsy, one of the top rated blogging applications for iPad has just been updated to support IBM Connections. Built by Fomola, Blogsy provides yet another option for iPad users to blog within IBM Connections while on the go.
Check out what Lance Barton from Fomola had to say about the newly added support for IBM Connections in Blogsy: - First, tell us what Blogsy does? In simple terms Blogsy is a blogging app. You use it to post to your blog or edit drafts and posts you have online. - What differentiates Blogsy from other similar iPad apps? There are several big things which differentiate Blogsy from other blogging apps. First, we have WYSIWYG formatting so when users format their blog post, set image alignment and so many other things they actually see what it will look like instead of just seeing the HTML. Secondly, we provide easy access and use of the most commonly used blog content. For example, Picasa, Flickr and YouTube accounts are set up in Blogsy so users don't have to leave Blogsy and go search for an embed code so they can use it in a post. They can just drag it right into their post in Blogsy from the appropriate panel. Blogsy also has Google Image Search built in so users can easily find pictures they may like to add to their post. But we didn't stop there, we also added a built-in browser. Users can drag images and links right from the browser instead of having to copy and paste embed codes. We also have a Blogsy bookmarklet. So if users are surfing in Safari and find something they would like to blog about they can tap on the bookmarklet and it will open that site in Blogsy, making it easy to write about it and create a link to it. Finally, Blogsy does everything through easy menus instead of forcing people to learn how to change things in the HTML. I better stop talking now or you may never get me to stop. - What has been the response so far community? As far as the blogging community in general goes, the response has been amazingly good. In the beginning it started off with major blogs and hardcore bloggers writing about Blogsy. Blogsy was on the "New and Noteworthy" and "What's Hot" sections in many of the App Stores around the world. And it also received awards and made it on must-have lists. But the average iPad user didn't know or hear about Blogsy. Then with time and improvements to Blogsy the word spread and more and more people have come to know of Blogsy. We feel there are still a lot of blogging iPad owners that have not heard of Blogsy yet. We hope with time every blogger will know about Blogsy. The vast majority of the feedback we get is positive and that helps keep us motivated to continue to improve Blogsy.
- What new features are you working on for your next release? In our latest release - code named Centaur - we add a whole bunch of new features. Here are just a few. 1. IBM Connections support - Now bloggers that use IBM Connections can use Blogsy. 2. Email - Now you can create and send richly formatted emails. Now, if your blogging platform is not supported by Blogsy and provides the ability to email-to-post then you can use Blogsy to create blog posts. Or it's good for sending richly formatted emails to friends and family. Also other services have features provided through email. For example you can email to Mail Chimp and it will send it to all your subscribers. 3. YouTube double tap to open in browser. - Not sure if the YouTube video is the one you want to use? Just double tap on it and it will open in Blogsy's built-in browser where you can watch it or find out more information about it. 4. Blogger page support - Now you can create and edit Blogger pages. 5. YouTube private/unlisted videos. - Now Blogsy will show YouTube videos you have set to unlisted or private so you can now drag and drop them into your posts. 6. Remove Apple style span (unnecessary html code) - We now strip out the unnecessary HTML Apple adds. 7. Changed b, i tag to strong, em tag. - iOS uses the b and i tags for bolding and italics. This is not the standard HTML so some blog themes have style settings for "strong" and "em" but not "b" and "i". This would cause inconsistencies in post styling. Blogsy now converts "b" and "i" to "strong" and "em".
If you'd like to see the full list and writeup about this update you can check out our blog post about it. http://www.fomola.com/blog/?p=428
In general we keep our update information a secret until we have submitted it to Apple. So people follow our blog or subscribe to us on Mail Chimp to know the latest information. - Where can people go to to learn more about Blogsy and the integration with IBM Connections? Well, we did a special video showing IBM Connections in Blogsy (http://youtu.be/ZwzzI3M5u8Y). But other than that there is no real specific information based on platforms. Blogsy basically works the same with all platforms it supports. The only real differences come down to blog settings which vary according to what the API supports. For information for that users can check out our platforms page - http://blogsyapp.com/platforms/.
I also suggest that all users check out our how-to videos. Lots of people have told us that they really helped them get the most out of Blogsy. The videos can be found in Blogsy in the Settings menu under "How-To Videos" or at www.blogsyapp.com/how-to. - Anything else you want to say? Yes, we believe that support is just as important as the product. So we do our best to respond right away and solve any issues a user may have. We love it when users email us with feedback so they shouldn't be shy about dropping me an email - info@fomola.com
Also, I want to thank you Luis for all your help. You have been amazingly supportive in this whole process! I wish we had some kind of swag we could send you.
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