2. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Agenda
Why Social Software for business?
IBM Lotus® Connections 2.5
How does Lotus Connections help me?
How is Lotus Connections integrated with everyday
tools?
Q&A
Slide 2
3. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Making sense out of Web 2.0
AJAX folksonomy
Mash-ups Web 2.0 Video Sharing
RSS
ATOM MySpace
Facebook
Blogs
Wiki Digg
Tags Social
Avatars
bookmarking Computing
Social Networks
LinkedIn Flickr
Consumerization Communities
del.icio.us
REST
Why should my business care?
4. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Social Networking, Blogs, wikis ……
“When it comes to using Web 2.0 collaboration tools, the momentum is behind
wikis, blogs, and social networking, though primarily among co-workers. Some
70% of InformationWeek 500 companies say their employees are using those
tools this year, compared with 55% last year.”
InformationWeek 500, September 2008
“Trends Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More”
4
www.informationweek.com/news/management/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210601098
"It will eventually be seen as essential to all large firms, encouraging more
open and transparent communications with staff around the world, and helping
to improve relations with existing and potential customers."
Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner, July 2008
“Study encourages businesses to embrace social networking”
www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2221395/study-encourages-businesses
5. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Increasingly, workers of all ages & roles find
themselves “virtual”
83% of IT Executives consider their company
to be a virtual workplace (up from 57% in
2006)
91% of employees work in locations other
than headquarters
The number of virtual workers has increased
by 800% from 2000-2005
We connect more often across the
Web than across the table…
Source: Building the Successful Virtual Workplace, 2007,
Getting a Grip on Collaboration, 2005
Nemertes Research Inc.
6. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
How to find the right people and
information
Work environments are more complex
Work environments are more disconnected
More interactions with unknown people
7. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Need to Improve Business Execution &
Reuse Best Practices
Most work today involves dynamic
processes being delivered by
dispersed groups of people
Making business decisions
involves more than just
traditional IT applications
–Emails / Faxes / Forms
–Instant Message Chats
–Team Discussions
–Web Pages, Documents,
Presentations, or Spreadsheets
–Web Conferences
People need simple ways to structure Adapted from: *C. Hill, R. Yates, C. Jones, S. Kogan, Beyond predictable
adhoc activities and harvest best workflows: Enhancing productivity in artful business processes, IBM Systems
Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, 2006,
practice templates for the future http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/454/hill.html
8. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
IBM Lotus® Connections 2.5
9. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
IBM Lotus® Connections social software
Lotus Connections is
social software for
business that
empowers you to be Home page
more innovative and
helps you execute
more quickly by
using dynamic Profiles Communities
networks of
coworkers, partners
and customers.
Blogs Files Activities Wikis Dogear
10. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Profiles
Communities
Quickly find the people you
Create, find, join, and work with
need by searching across your All your social software needs communities of people who
organization and connecting to ready for business share a common interest,
others. Status updates keeps responsibility, or area of
others informed. expertise
Bookmarks Blogs Activities
Save, organize and share A personal content publishing tool Organize your work, plan next
bookmarks; discover to present your ideas and get steps, and easily tap your
bookmarks that have been feedback from others; learn from expanding professional network
qualified by others with similar the expertise and experience of to help execute your everyday
interests & expertise others who blog deliverables, faster
Homepage Files Wikis
Manage your attention by Upload and share any type of file Create wiki spaces for
viewing relevant social data with colleagues and individuals, groups, and
aggregated across your communities. Store versions and communities to coauthor pages.
subscriptions, notifications, and view downloads, comments and View changes across pages,
network of colleagues. ratings. ratings, and comments.
11. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
What’s new in Lotus Connections 2.5
Wiki Service
A new Lotus Connections wiki feature lets you create wiki sites to
collectively author documents with others.
Files Service
Connections files makes sharing files with other people a snap
Mobile access
Support for mobile browser to Lotus Connections Profiles from
iPhone or Nokia s60 device.
Micro-blogging
Profiles now features status updates and a profile "board" that lets
you easily post messages to other users' profiles.
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12. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
What’s changed in Lotus Connections 2.5
Evolution of Communities
– Any Community can include:
• A discussion Forum, Shared Bookmarks, Shared Feeds
• Activities,A Community Blog,Community Files, Wikis
– Community discussion forums have a new look and now show the number of
replies for each topic. Community owners can customize the look of their
community and move widgets around on the community home page.
Federated Updates Across Connections
The Connections home page keeps you informed with the new Updates
tab. You can discover contributions across all Lotus Connections
services (including the micro-blogging Status Updates).
Federated Search
Easily search all Connections applications, and filter by tags, person, or
time range. Or scope your search to a specific service, such as Profiles.
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13. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Profiles
Status Updates in Profiles
– Experts, teammates, and others share progress, share new discoveries, ask
questions
– I stayed informed, listen to the wisdom of the crowd, and discover new
ideas/information/assets
– I share with others so they know if I’m working on something that might help
them
Profiles: Helps me understand holistically who someone is
– Enterprise Info and Social Information
– Social contributions, conversations on user’s Board
Federated Status Updates
– Staying Informed on changes in my Network
– Discovering information and people helps me be innovative and leverage the work of
others
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14. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Conversational Collaboration –
“microblogging”
Letting others stay
informed on my work
Asking your Network
What My
Network is
doing and
saying
Slide 14
15. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop |the
How Dallas Innovation Center
Enterprise
Describes How I
Me
360 Degrees of Me … Describe Me
and You
Putting a
Face to a Who I work
Name for
What am I
doing Now
Building My
Professional
Network
How others
describe me
Who am I
outside of
Work
What I’ve been
The History of Contributing
My
Conversations Slide 15
16. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Staying informed by leveraging My Network
The Entire
Enterprise
My Network
Tracking
Experts and
Information
“nodes”
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17. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Discover People and Share Information
Discover experienced people – through Profiles
Contact experts using Profiles
Invite discussion and feedback using Blogs
Discover people’s knowledge through blogs
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18. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Profile Value & Strategy
Expanded customized profile data fields and views for your
organization
Improve your ability to identify, develop and maintain relationships
within your professional network
Expand social networks by allowing you to identify your colleagues
and easily stay in touch
Aggregate all your social data in one place for others to easily
discover your work
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19. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Profiles Features
Colleagues
– Invitations to connect
– integrated with SMTP server
– Updates from your colleagues through Atom feeds
Tagging
– Tag yourself and others
– View network by tag
Customization
– Widgets to display custom fields and external data
Business Card
– Built to be integrated into other applications
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21. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
What is a Blog?
A Weblog or a blog is a website where entries are made in journal style
and displayed in a reverse chronological order
The power of blogs is that they allow individuals to easily publish their
ideas, and a lot more to comment on them
Blogs is a key tool for social networking providing medium to share
knowledge and build relationships
Blogs can help facilitate and unlock the expertise of individuals within an
organization, internally or externally
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22. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Blog Value Strategy
Blogging Options
– Post to more than one blog, internally and externally
– Team blogs
– Moderated
Multiple Views
– Date,Title
– Most Recommended, Commented, Visited
Flexible Search
– Author, Comment, Content, Tag, Title
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24. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Work Efficiently
PRACTICES
Business is constantly changing. How can
Lotus Connections help me work more
effectively and share best practices?
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25. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
What Is Activities
An activity is a way for you to organize your work and collaborate with
others in a shared web space
The Activities Service, or server, is a Web Application running in the
WebSphere J2EE Container
Designed to help you organize the information and the people you
need
Makes it easy to:
– Track your work with a dashboard
– Invite and share your tasks with others
– Manage to-dos that you and your team have
– Discover and share best practices by creating activity templates
– Effectively execute on assignments
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26. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Activity Value & Strategy
Organize and aggregate resources to plan and guide work, respond
and take action
Leverage your network to execute ideas faster and reuse best
practices through activity templates
Identify critical and timely Activities in revised dashboard view
Organize your activities in personalized views
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27. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Activities Features
Customizable Organization
– Collect entries into sections
– Assign properties to any entry (on-the-fly ‘forms’), and associate
them with specific sections
Templates
– Build reusable human processes and task ‘good practices’
Customization
Publish finished work to IBM Lotus Quickr
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29. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Communities
Bringing together people with common interests to discuss relevant
issues, and poll colleagues to get information
Connect with specific communities
– Defines groups of people with a common interest or work
objective
– Ability to create, find, join, communicate with and leverage
specific communities based on expertise and interests
– Find communities with common interests
– View the Community goals and how to interact with the
community
– Navigate to the community’s blog posts, bookmarks and
feeds
– Use email and broadcast tools to contact members of the
community
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30. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Community & Value Strategy
Promotes discussion among community members and
knowledge sharing by subject matter experts
Aggregates information from across Lotus Connections and
external resources
Provides access to advanced community collaboration tools
with a common membership list
Allows you to address the community in external applications,
like email
Provides simple integration for any community to access other
applications like wikis or teamrooms
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32. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Finding Information
Information is all over the place. How can Lotus
Connections help me be more effective at
finding information that is valuable and
relevant?
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33. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Dogear Features
Dogear Options
– Add a bookmark to Dogear, Communities, Activities, and Blogs in
one step
– Flag as broken URL
– Notify others
– Import existing browser and del.icio.us bookmarks, export Dogear
bookmarks
– Replace and delete tags across your bookmarks
Multiple Views
– By: Date, Popularity, Most Visited, Person, Tag, Personal Watchlist
Flexible Search
– All Bookmarks, My Bookmarks
– By Person, By Tag
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35. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Accesing from Oneplace
Social data is ever expanding.
How do I keep track of it all?
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36. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Homepage Value & Strategy
Keep up to date using your social Homepage
Delivers an aggregated view of latest Lotus Connections information
Improves your ability to track critical information and people
Eases management of your incoming requests and tasks
Provides faster access to your rapidly expanding social capital
Slide 36
38. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Agenda
What is Lotus Connections?
How does it help me?
How is it Integrated into my Everyday Tools?
Technical Overview
Slide 38
39. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Available access points
Out-of-box access from multiple clients:
– Browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari*)
– Inbox (Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook*)
– Word processing/spreadsheet/presentation tools (Microsoft Office,
Lotus Symphony)
– Instant messaging clients (Lotus Sametime)
– Portals (WebSphere Portal, JSR 168 portlet)
– Mobile devices (Windows Mobile*, BlackBerry*, others)
– Team collaboration sites (Lotus Quickr*, Microsoft SharePoint*)
Designed to be integrated with other applications
– REST-style API (Atompub/ASF)
– SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.
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40. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Agenda
What is Lotus Connections?
How does it help me?
How is it Integrated into my Everyday Tools?
Technical Overview
Slide 40
41. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Lotus Connections Functional Topology
Lotus Connections Service Corporate LDAP
Requires IBM WebSphere® Application Server Directory
6.1.0.13 on: (ITDS 6, MS Active Directory
• Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 4 2003, Domino 7/8, SunOne)
• Microsoft Windows 2003 Server
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Intel
• IBM AIX 5.3 64 bit OS
Relational Database
Access Points (IBM DB2® 9.1 software, Oracle
• Browsers One or more 10G, and Microsoft SQL 2005)
• IBM Lotus Notes® services …
• IBM Lotus Sametime® • Activities
• IBM WebSphere Portal • Profiles
• IBM Lotus Quickr* • Dogear
• Web applications • Blogs
• Microsoft Office • Communities
• Microsoft Outlook* • Homepage*
Slide 41
* Coming H1 2008
42. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Six Enterprise Services
Slide 42
43. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Supported Software
Server side operating system LDAP Directory
IBM Tivoli Directory Server (ITDS)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Enterprise Server 6.0.0.3
V4.0 on x86-32 Lotus Domino 7.0.2 and later
Microsoft Windows 2003 Server - Standard Microsoft Active Directory 2003
Service Pack 2
Microsoft Windows 2003 Server – Enterprise Sun Java System Directory Server
SUSE Enterprise Server 10 5.2
Database
AIX 5.3.0.4 and later IBM DB2 V9.1 Fix Pack 2
Oracle 10g 10.2.0.3
Web browser support Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and later Enterprise
Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (Microsoft Windows,
Linux and Mac)
Application server
IBM WebSphere Application Server
V6.1.0.13
HTTP Server
IBM HTTP Server from WebSphere
Application Server V6.1.0.13 (IHS)
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44. Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center
Additional Information
Lotus Connections (www.ibm.com/lotus/connections)
– Latest product info
– Research
– Podcasts
– and more
Slide 44