The Connections Blog

Well worth reviewing these new articles in the Connections wiki.  Leslie Gallo writes:

To wrap up my publication announcements for 2008, I wanted to point out three articles that were posted on the Lotus Connections wiki in the month of December:
       •        "How to customize Profiles in IBM Lotus Connections 2.0", by Cheng Ying Ying and Xie Ling
       •        "Using the Installation Wizard to manage IBM Lotus Connections Connector Plug-ins", by Shen Xue and Zhang Jun Jing
       •        "Using the IBM Lotus Connections 2.0 migration tool to migrate artifacts", by Xie Ling and Zhang Jun Jing

The authors are all from IBM's China Development Lab in Shanghai, where they work on the Functional Verification Test team for Lotus Connections.

Excellent work...

A super opening for a Lotus Connections developer in Colorado:

IBM Lotus Connections Developer at NewsGator in Denver, CO
Dec 08, 2008        

Overview
Develop and debug NewsGator applications for IBM Lotus Connections. Responsible for overall system architecture/design for capabilities implemented in Connections, coding of those capabilities, implementing Connections for testing and evaluating those capabilities, and giving guidance to the QA team on testing in Connections. May also perform the same duties for IBM Lotus Quickr development.

Responsibilities
Research, design, and develop new features for company products.
Design technical specifications for assigned features and architectural improvements. Candidate must be proficient in writing use cases and other supplemental requirement specifications as required.
Review and hand-off technical designs to test engineers in an effort to ensure quality delivery of product.
Participate in code design and code reviews with appropriate team members as necessary.
Develop and deliver to aggressive product release schedules working as a cooperative team member in an agile development environment.

Experience
Strong software engineering and problem solving skills.
5-7 solid years of professional experience developing web-based applications.
Experience developing JavaScript, DHTML, and AJAX or JSON based applications.
Experience developing to JSR-000168 Portlet Specification
Experience developing to IWidget (Eclipse Platform API Specification)
Understanding of IBM Lotus Connections architecture and implementation
Experience implementing IBM Lotus Connections in a customer environment is highly desired
Ability to work effectively with DB2is highly desired.
Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements into technical designs.
Demonstrated ability to identify, prioritize, and execute tasks to meet critical project deadlines.
Ability to take ownership of extensive development tasks.
Demonstrated ability to work in a team-oriented environment and get along well with others.

Two comments:
1.        This looks like a great position for someone with the right skills and in that geographical location.  Newsgator's feed reader products and technologies are second to none in my opinion, and I have heard they are a good corporation to work for.
2.        I am thrilled that this suggests that Newsgator are developing applications for Lotus Connections and possibly Lotus Quickr.  This is great news for these platforms...

Happy New Year to all!  Thanks for continuing to read this blog, and we're looking forward to sharing more news with you through 2009, particularly from Lotusphere in just a fortnight's time!

This is a great quote to start the year - from an article by CG Lynch in CIO magazine "Web 2.0, Social Networks in '09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation":

IBM, for its part, has more aggressively shown willingness to move forward with Lotus Connections, which right now has a better design than the social software features in SharePoint, which is largely still a document management system.

Sounds about right!

IBM is clearly spending a lot of time researching and developing ideas on social software and web2.0.  Developments such as Lotus Connections, Atlas, Beehive and Cattail are great evidence of that.  Bill Ives, well respected author at the FASTforward blog, takes a look at some of the output from this research:

IBM Research is looking at four main areas: understanding adoption, usage patterns, motivations, and impact. This position paper [Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace] gives a brief overview of the key findings from last two:  motivations and impact on the workplace. The found that within a company intranet's protected environment, employees choose to reach out on Beehive to new people rather than only connecting to those they know, which is different than behavior reported on Facebook. Now I have seen a lot of reaching out to new people who have connections to known people on Facebook but still, this is interesting. They also found that employees also share personal details that have not appeared with any significant frequency within IBM on other enterprise social software tools, such as intranet social bookmarking and blogging.

Looking further through in-depth interview they found three motivations: interacting with colleagues on a personal level, career advancement, and the ability to convince others to support ideas and projects. They wrote that, employees use Beehive to present themselves professionally and to network with those they believe can assist them in their career goals within IBM. Being part of large consulting organization in a past life, I can understand the internal marketplace dynamics that this system plays into.  Social media is often used for viral marketing in the external marketplaces so it is not surprising that people would make use of its capabilities in a large organization with an active marketplace for people, ideas, and projects.

The researchers also looked at impact. They found that the more intensely someone uses Beehive (as measured by more frequent visits and stronger associations with the online community) the higher their reported social capital, across all measures. In other words, they have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise.
[emphasis mine]

Fascinating stuff, and whilst not particularly surprising - the more you put in, the more you get out - the research does help to put pay to the ideas that time spent on social tools is wasted productivity.

A fascinating research paper, and interesting comment from Bill.

Superb post by Stephen Londergan, entitled "Advocating for social software: consider your audience":

The first step in making social software success at your company is identifying your audience -- you likely have a few key constituencies to work with, and the way you approach and talk to each is probably a little different. I propose there are three key audiences you'll want to approach:


AKA the big shots. You'll want to talk to these folks about business value, the ways social software can drive productivity and innovation, and how Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, and/or Lotus Sametime can help with the bottom line. Lots of times these folks hold the purse strings, so they are a key demographic and deserve all your powers of persuasion.
Do:
+ focus on business benefits, success stories & anecdotes from your own pilot or from the Soapbox's tagged case studies
+ keep the conversation on the real-world tangible advantages that Collaboration 2.0 holds for your organization or that executive's particular department/line of business
Don't:
- get caught up in technology gorp
- get in disputes about feature functions at the expense of capabilities and benefits
- forget to talk about how Collaboration 2.0 can help effect the bottom line -- either in terms of increased productivity/cost savings or in terms of innovation/new opportunity

Stephen goes on to discuss how to work with the end users and the IT folks.  He also links to other resources on his blog that can help you in these objectives.

Great post.

An excellent article on thestandard.com, describing how the US FAA is using social networking tools to help it manage disaster situations left by huricanes:

"We need to reach our people to find out [if they are OK]," says Hadar, who supports the FAA's disaster recovery efforts. "We also need to know where they are and if they are available to participate in the recovery." Once everyone is accounted for, the agency needs to figure out which disaster recovery specialists will do what, and who their counterparts are at other federal, state and local agencies. The specialists themselves have to track their emails, instant messages and voicemails, and locate the documents needed to bring equipment back online.

It's a perfect situation for taking social computing tools, such as online social networks and group communications tools like wikis and keyword tagging, and putting them to work as a form of knowledge management.

...

The FAA started thinking about how to use social networking tools in 2000, when Alan Stensland, its Eastern Service Area emergency coordinator, saw Lotus QuickPlace, a team collaboration platform, and Lotus Sametime, an instant messaging tool, at a trade show. After the 2005 hurricane season, Stensland's desire for better ways to connect his disaster recovery specialists only increased. So the FAA, a heavy IBM user, became a beta tester for what would become Lotus Connections, which includes social networking tools like Profiles (a directory of people and their expertise), Communities, Blogs, the Dogear tagging tool, and Activities (a dashboard). It also upgraded from QuickPlace to Quickr and moved to IBM's WebSphere Portal.

The FAA's disaster recovery response leverages the use of these tools, which run through the Activities dashboard. Its 200 or so disaster recovery specialists invite people to join their networks via Profiles, and use Activities as a kind of electronic project bin: voicemails, documents and their electronic receipts for a project will go into it, making it easy to track and share with other agencies, easing the hassle of post-disaster spending audits.

An excellent case study, and well worth a read if you're interested in how Lotus Connections is being used in the real world.

Now this is great...

Integration between virtual worlds, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Connections - just don't ask me to give you the business justification right now ;-)  Forterra's latest press release:

Virtual Worlds—Better Experience and Less Costly
than Conference Calls

Forterra Systems Offers Innovative Collaboration Features and IBM Lotus Sametime Integration with OLIVE 2.2 Release

SAN MATEO, CA— (Business Wire – December 2, 2008) — Forterra Systems, a market and technology leader in enterprise virtual worlds, announced today that it will ship the 2.2 release of its OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform this month. The release includes new collaboration features and IBM Lotus Sametime integration.

It goes on to say:

In their October 31, 2008 Forrester Research report titled Will Unified Communications Make Virtual Worlds Relevant To Business, TJ Keitt and Henry Dewing indicated “As the workplace has changed and as decentralized information workers demand tools to allow them to work together, companies have to rethink their collaboration, training, and knowledge management schemes.  According to a recent survey of North American and European enterprise IT decision-makers, 49% view implementing an enterprise collaboration strategy as a priority in the next 12 months.  However, current collaboration and knowledge management tools are still developing and often jumble efforts to bring together employees rather than streamlining their interactions. Consolidating information worker tools in a holistic platform is a trend that Forrester has labeled as the Information Workplace.  Virtual worlds, with their rich graphical interfaces, seem — at least on the surface — to be great for simulating a gamut of experiences to these distributed information workers.”



"Our customers are asking how their communications and collaboration strategy can combine real-time presence, voice and data sharing capabilities with the richness of virtual worlds”, noted Bruce Morse, vice president of unified communications and collaboration, IBM Lotus. "We believe Forterra's plug-in to Sametime will provide important functionality for our customers, and be an easy means for users to start experiencing a virtual world."

and:

The key OLIVE capabilities being released this month include:

 * A Virtual Meeting Reservation System that allows a meeting organizer to reserve a 3D room type (example: auditorium, board room, classroom), room equipment (example: projector screen size, chairs, and podiums), and to invite mandatory and optional attendees. Invitations are sent out through the user’s native email system (example: Lotus Notes, MS Exchange), and if accepted display in their native calendaring system.
 * Presenting on 3D screens and viewing by all participants a spectrum of media including MS PowerPoint files, streaming videos (Windows Media Player-based), any software application running on a Windows desktop, and collaborative whiteboards.
 * A Lotus Sametime plug-in so users can achieve single sign-on to OLIVE from Lotus Sametime, instantly invite colleagues to join a 3D meeting directly from their Lotus Sametime client, or schedule a future meeting through the Virtual Meeting Reservation System. A demonstration of this integration between Lotus Sametime with OLIVE is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVY8fmKXH9Y
 * Presence awareness of other OLIVE or Sametime users logged in. Users can quickly join a colleague in a virtual environment by teleporting to their location.
 * Avatar profiles through integration with any social networking system like LinkedIn, Facebook, Lotus Connections, or a Learning Management System or enterprise HR system so users can view the profile of another meeting attendee by right clicking on their avatar.

So click on an avatar in the virtual world and it will pull up the Profiles business card from Lotus Connections. Excellent stuff.

Nice article in The Business Times (Singapore):

IS YOUR e-mail inbox besieged by a barrage of friendly requests that you end up ignoring? Do you hear about people posting on each other's 'Walls' and wonder what they're talking about? Do you hear the term 'social networking' and think 'sure, it's nice to catch up with old friends, but that doesn't have any value for my business'?

The social networking phenomenon isn't just for tracking down old high school chums. It has become a powerful way for businesses, large and small, to grow and prosper. Up to 70 per cent of online conversations in social networks are about brands.

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, then you - and your business - are missing out.

The social networking phenomenon isn't just for tracking down old high school chums. It has become a powerful way for businesses, large and small, to grow and prosper. According to estimates, more than 530 million people are using social networks worldwide. One study has estimated that up to 70 per cent of online conversations in social networks are about brands, according to the consultancy FusionBrand. That's a lot of potential customers surfing the Web and looking for information on products.

The author, Neeraj Shaabi, goes on to look at some of the options open to smaller businesses:

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in particular, can take advantage of collaborative computing tools to communicate with customers, increase productivity and, therefore, drive sales - all at relatively low costs.

Admittedly, the choices can be daunting. Facebook or MySpace? LinkedIn or Twitter? Or use of third party software to develop your own network? And with an SME, you might think that you do not have the time or the resources to commit to maintaining a social networking presence. Here are some tips on how you can effectively bring a social network into your small or medium-sized business:

# Explore all your options: Facebook and Myspace are the big brand names in the space, but there is software such as Lotus Connections or other offerings that can help you build a customised network. Or, you can open a Twitter account and send messages directly to people who follow your feed. Users range from major corporations to SMEs such as restaurants that use Twitter effectively to provide updates on service and special discounts to customers.

Admittedly Neeraj is a little biased - he is General Manager, Software Group of IBM Singapore, but it's still good that Lotus Connections is mentioned as one of the main offerings for organisations looking to build social networks.  The article is well worth a read.

This is great timing - the Lotus Connections v2.0 Administration certification is now available, and Lotusphere is just around the corner so everyone can take their exams there:

IBM Certified System Administrator - Lotus Connections 2.0

Job Role Description / Target Audience
This intermediate level certification is intended for system administrators who perform the installation, configuration and day-to-day tasks associated with ensuring the smooth and efficient operation of an IBM Lotus Connections 2.0 environment. This administrator is generally self-sufficient and is able to perform most of the tasks involved in the role with limited assistance from peers, product documentation and vendor support services.

Requirements
This certification requires 1 test(s).

Test(s):
  1. Test 957 - Administering IBM Lotus Connections 2.0

The exam itself covers the following areas:

Exam 957: Administering IBM Lotus Connections 2.0

Exam Competencies
Exam Type: Multiple Choice

Description: Covers Lotus Connections 2.0 material as it relates to these competency areas:

   * Install and Configure
   * Manage and Maintain
   * Security

There is a full list of topics included on the Test Objectives page.  The exam certainly looks comprehensive!

This is an exciting development (especially given my previous travails with the installing on Connections fixpacks!) - Lotus Connections now has a graphical update installer for fixpacks and updates. Yaay!

Update Installer for Lotus Connections V2.0.1.0

Abstract
The Update Installer is the tool used to install updates (Interim Fixes, Fix Packs, and Refresh Packs) to IBM Lotus Connections Version 2.0.1.0 software.

Download Description
The Update Installer for Lotus Connections provides the following functionality:

  * Graphical user interface (GUI) support
  * Silent installation option
  * Installation and removal of individual and multiple-code updates
  * Logging and tracking, recovery features and prerequisite handling

I have to upgrade my test server to 2.0.1 today, so will report back with some screenshots.

Anyone had experience with the graphical update installer?  Is so, please leave a comment and let us know how it went.