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Subscribe via EmailAnnouncement: Lotus Connections 2.0 delivers social software for businesses:
OverviewThe product ships on Friday, yaay!
IBM Lotus Connections is social software for business. It empowers business professionals to build and call upon networks of colleagues with whom they can share information, develop and refine new creative ideas, and collaborate on activities. This can help individuals to become more innovative and execute tasks more quickly.
Lotus Connections includes the following six integrated services that can be used independently, or together to deliver more value.
New features of Lotus Connections 2.0
Profiles: Quickly find the people you need by using keyword search
* People can build a network of colleagues to help them get their job done.
* Profile data can be customized to match what is most relevant to a company.
* Social tagging can be used to associate individuals with topics improving search.
Communities: Create, find, join, and work with communities of people
* Discussion forums are now provided.
* The ability to integrate with wikis from Socialtext and Confluence is now included
* Lotus Sametime Advanced can be used to communicate with a community
Blogs: Present your ideas in a Weblog and get feedback from others
* Recommend and notify other users of a blog entry they might find useful.
* Flag content as inappropriate to alert an administrator.
Dogear: Save, organize, and share bookmarks
* Send and receive notification of interesting bookmarks.
* Use a new tool to add a bookmark to Dogear, activities and communities.
Activities: Gather the e-mails, IM chats, documents, messages, and other information that you need to accomplish a business objective
* Information within an Activity can be organized into sections.
* The content entry form for an Activity can be customized with additional fields, including dates, people, and text
A new home page: Provides you with a consolidated view of your social data across the Lotus Connections services. You are presented with a view of:
* A Profiles widget displaying your colleagues with an indication of their new entries across the services, and also a data entry field for a search of profiles
* A widget displaying bookmarks lets you customize the view to include Popular bookmarks, Watchlisted bookmarks, or Recent Bookmarks
* A Communities widget show which communities you belong to along with an indication of which ones have been recently updated
* An Activities widgets shows your todos in a calendar, responses to your posts in activities, new entries in high priority activities, and a quick view of all the activities in which a user participates or owns.
* A blogs widget shows the most recent blog entries
* The Home Page is extensible, so administrators can add in widgets from external sites or their own internal applications.
By empowering your people to easily connect to employees, partners, and customers, Lotus Connections helps you realize the following professional and business benefits:
* Tasks can be executed faster because you have quick access to information from an expanded professional network
* Decisions can be made with confidence knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience.
* Innovative products and services can be created from communities of employees, partners, and customers - driving growth for your business.
Planned availability dates:Well done to Heidi, Suzanne, Mike, Adrian and the rest of the Connections team. This is great news.
June 13, 2008 (electronic software delivery) English only.
July 11, 2008 (electronic software delivery) National language versions.
July 14, 2008 (media and documentation). English only
August 12, 2008 (media and documentation) National language versions.
By: Connections Blog | 4 Comments | On: 10 June 2008 12:58:26 | Tags: connections lotus announcement 2.0
Comments
.. that this is realy a 2.0 product or should be in the realm of 1.5? All the top stuff is what they have now with an added homepage, some widgets and some more profile fields. Just curious
There is a lot of new functionality in there (homepage, communities, forums, offline activities etc.) so yes, I think that it is a 2.0 product.
As to whether it has gone far enough? Well, I think we're just going to have to wait and see. What I would say is that we can't afford to wait another 12 months for the next major release. The game has changed now, particularly in the social networking/web2.0 space, and I think IBM needs to step it up - even every 6 months will mean that it will lag behind the nimble SaaS companies out there.
Chris, I've been using connections 1.0.2 for long time and then participated in connections 2.0 beta.
Here's my comment... 1.0.2 was actually 0.5
2.0 is 2.0, the changes are deep in the code, installation is streamlined, the "features" are now more complete (activities improvement is astounding) and finally the "homepage".
Many thinks it's just a nice "dashboard". That's absolutely wrong.
Homepage is a real iWidget container you can extend AND it's an IMPRESSIVE search engine that indexes the content from all the other modules allowing "global" tagged search on profiles, blogs, communities, dogears and activities while respecting access control and allowing "tag drill down" search.
With the new plugins coming soon I think Connections is "killer" stuff.
The hard part is making the customer "get it". Maybe Marketing / HR / Management likes social network. but when it comes to deployement IT has to get it and understand this is a new "enterprise application" both in terms of management and integration (LDAP etc).
So far I presented it a couple of times.. and users seems to get it. I'm hoping to see the thing happen (and finally deploy it for production).
The Lotus Connections Profiles service permits a user to share their contact information, report to chain, and details they provide in their About Me section on the Profiles page. This new widget permits a Lotus Connections user to include information from their LinkedIn profile in their Lotus Connections profile. Some examples of LinkedIn information that can be included on a Lotus Connections Profile include: job experience, education, honors and awards, personal interests, Web sites, number of recommendations and specialties.