The Connections Blog

IBM had seemed to be hiding its light under a bushel when it comes revealing details of what is new in Lotus Connections 2.0.1.  There was preciously little information on the Connections product pages or in the Infocenter.

Thankfully, Luis Benitez brings us his own description:

One question that I'm continuously asked is: "what's new in Lotus Connections v2.0.1?". Well, here's a list of what I've gathered:

   * Quickr integration with Activities - Push-button publication from an Activity into one of your Quickr Places for permanent document storage
   * Quickr integration with Communities - Allows communities to use Quickr as their content repository and document collaboration platform.
   * Enhanced person card
   * E-mail is no longer a required attribute (great for external implementations)
   * New feeds inside of Communities
   * New feeds for forums
   * New APIs for Activities, Blogs, Communities, Homepage (federated search), Profiles
   * Hidden support for STLinks (more about this tomorrow)
   * User Interface and Usability enhancements, for example:
         o Can now save members as part of an activity template
         o Drag-n-drop activities entries
         o Uploading images to a blog is now easier
         o Improvements in the Activities widget
         o Easier way to work with multiple bookmarks
   * A couple of bug fixes

Excellent, Luis!

After reading this, I went to check out the out the Infocenter again, and voila! We now have some much better documentation:

What's new in administering?
Lotus Connections:

   * Preventing e-mail addresses from being displayed
   * Removing the data associated with a person or group
   * Changing the language used for notifications

Activities feature:

   * Integrating Activities with IBM Lotus Quickr

Blogs feature:

   * Synchronizing user data

Communities feature:

   * Changing Communities configuration settings
   * Removing unwanted or inappropriate content
   * Filtering active content
   * Configuring the size of the community description
   * Configuring display settings
   * Managing members and member IDs
   * Administering managed applications
   * Changing configuration settings for managed applications
   * Using the Lotus Quickr Delayed Synchronizer
   * Viewing and collecting Communities metrics
   * Retrieving and listing community data
   * Filtering community lists
   * Managing the forum scheduler

Dogear feature:

   * Synchronizing user data for Dogear

Home page feature:

   * Synchronizing member IDs between the Home page and LDAP databases

Profiles feature:

   * Updating the LDAP
   * Synchronizing LDAP changes with Profiles
   * Synchronizing the Profiles database with LDAP
   * Updating Profiles when changing LDAP directory
   * Determining the notification language for Profiles
   * Populating Profiles with photos
   * Uploading pronunciation files
   * Profiles attributes
   * Enabling custom extension attributes
   * Specifying a custom extension attribute label
   * Adding third-party links via the XML configuration file
   * Adding third-party links using JavaScript

What's new in extending?

   * Lotus Connections Connector for Lotus Quickr

Much much better! Go check out the Infocenter page for more details of each feature.