The Connections Blog

Well here we are again, approaching another exciting Lotusphere event.  Thoughts move to what aspects of Lotus Connections might be announced or clarified at this year's OGS, or at other sessions during the week.

At the end of Lotusphere 2009, we'd heard about plans for Connections 2.5 (dynamic communities, files/wikis, status updates and much more), RIM's plans for a new client for the Blackberry, and generally a lot of discussion of how well Connections was doing in the marketplace.  Nearly a year later, we have Connections 2.5 (released in late August, phenomenally well received by customers and press alike, doing well with the analysts and having sold millions of new licences in late 2009) and RIM have just announced their Connections client for Blackberry 2.3.  

All in all, 2009 was an awesome year for Lotus Connections - IBM promised a lot and delivered even more.  Connections is as good a product as any in the IBM Software Group portfolio right now. We at Collaboration Matters are doing a massive volume of work for customers deploying, upgrading and enhancing Lotus Connections 2.5 installations, and I'd like to say well deserved 'Thank You' to all those in the Connections team at IBM for providing such a fine release.

So what do I hope to hear at Lotusphere 2010?

• Details of Connections Next (one assumes 3.0). A number of journalists have already been briefed about an announcement of the next version at Lotusphere 2010, so that seems a dead cert.  I would imagine that 3.0 will be less revolutionary than 2.5 was, with a more natural evolution of the features already in 2.5.  In particular, I'd like to see:
  • More consistency across the features, particular around administrative control and editorial management of content, notifications, UI layouts, ability to update status from all features and so on.
  • An administration panel that covers all features, including statistics, trends, user counts, admin rights and more.
  • An end user "account" or "preferences" panel that allows an end user to reset their password, change subscriptions, allow/disallow board comments, remove colleagues etc.
  • The ability to have multiple networks of colleagues ("IT", "Strategy", "Football", "Social" etc) so that more control can be gained over status updates and notifications
  • More granular control over access to content, particularly profile details.
  • An unauthenticated homepage.  The Home Page feature in Connections 2.5 is fabulous - I and all my customers love it!  In some ways it is the ideal intranet site, except... unauthenticated users get presented with a sign in page and no content.  There needs to be a Home Page that pulls together all the public content from the Connections environment, before the user logs in.
  • Multiple blogs, activities etc. in a single Community
  • Continued improvements to installation and upgrade procedures.  This has been massively improved but there is still some way to go.
  • More integration with the Notes client - all 8 services should be accessible from within the Notes client, particularly the update of status, upload of files etc.
• Federation of multiple Connections environments - this is the *BIG* one for me.  More and more organisations want to have multiple Connections deployments, whether for geographical reasons (users in Australia and the UK for example) or for multiple user types (students vs. staff, internal vs. extranets) or for special events/communities (conferences like Lotusphere!), and there needs to be a way to get Profile data in particular (though ideally more content from other features too) between the environments.  If this is going to happen in Connections Next, I will be a very very happy man!
• More info on how organisations are using Connections and justifying their investment in the technology.  We need more use cases, references and advice on how to convince organisations to move forward with social technologies

and lastly?

• How much you all enjoyed attending the two sessions I'll be co-presenting at Lotusphere 2010:

If you do attend either session, please come up and introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you!

By: Stuart McIntyre - Connections | 1 Comments | On: 16 January 2010 09:33:11 | Tags:  lotusphere2010  connections 

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