Author

Stuart McIntyre

IBM Connections 6.0 Reviewer’s Guide

The IBM Connections Reviewer’s Guide has always been a useful document, for both prospective and existing customers. It outlines the key features of the new release, particularly focusing on new features and enhancements, but also provides an excellent overview of the product as a whole.

The Reviewer’s Guide for the latest release, 6.0, has just been published:

With this latest 6.0 release, we continue to build on the strong capabilities of IBM Connections by adding new and relevant features helping our customers to more effectively run their social enterprise environments. With IBM Connections 6 we added new functionality across the board from Communities, to Files, Search, Onboarding as well as the brand-new IBM Connections Homepage – Orient Me.

The IBM Connections 6.0 Reviewer’s Guide is available as a PDF for download – no registration is required.

April 6, 2017 0 comment

6.0 IBM Connections

IBM Connections 6.0 announced, generally available March 31st

written by Stuart McIntyre

They told us at Connect that IBM Connections 6.0 would be made available in Q1, and here’s the announcement that they’ll be sneaking it across the line on the 31st March…

Connections V6.0 adds new capabilities for creating and customizing engaging Communities, and offers users increased flexibility in syncing and managing their online and offline Files folders.
Updates:
Community customization capabilities can help to make a Community more useful and engaging for the Community members.
Doing so can lead to greater Community participation and provides a more effective collaboration experience for the Community members.
File folders can be taken offline to a PC for local work and then synchronized with the online folders.
Advanced analytics provide an optional personalized and prioritized home page that will surface information that is most relevant for the individual.

The significant new features are highlighted in the announcement letter, along with some of the implementation details:

Communities are more customizable
Advanced Community customization capabilities provide Community owners additional options for designing their custom Community. These changes allow a Community to be more useful and engaging, leading to increased community vitality. As Community owners build these vibrant communities, they can copy the existing layouts and designs from one Community into a new one.
Community owners can:
Create Community experiences with enhanced rich text content editing, so that Community members can enjoy an engaging experience.
Choose from new modern layouts with a horizontal navigation bar to better use space on Community pages and match the Community’s purpose more effectively.
Create new Communities faster by choosing from existing layouts, which can help to save time and establish guidelines for Community design.
Reduce clutter on Community pages by hiding a widget while retaining its link in the navigation menu.
Files delivers added flexibility
Files users can select a top-level folder in their Files and mark it for sync. This permits the users to take the content of entire folders offline to their desktop and keep them synchronized with the files on the server.
Relevant updates are brought front and center
A new optional program, IBM Connections Orient Me, can be used with Connections V6.0 to provide new home page capabilities that apply advanced analytics to surface information and people that are most relevant to an individual.
Individuals can take advantage of new capabilities provided by Connections Orient Me:
See, at a glance, the updates and information most relevant to users, displayed in a new visual layout and prioritized based on their interaction with content and people.
Apply new content and people filters to better control what users see.
More easily view updates grouped by a person, a Community, or content.
Receive suggestions about the people most likely to be important and relevant to their work.
See a snapshot of their day in the Action Center, accessible throughout Connections.
Connections Orient Me is planned for availability on the availability date of Connections V6.0. Connections Orient Me is planned to be made available for download from the Fix Central website by organizations with entitlement to Connections V6.0

As previously blogged, this is set to be the final on-premises release of Connections built the run wholly on the traditional platform of WebSphere/DB2/IHS/TDI etc. Connections Pink will start to arrive in pieces from later this year, running on an entirely more dynamic and easier-to-manage infrastructure. You will need to be running 6.0 to make that transition, so start the planning process now to get there as soon as you can.

Connections 6.0 will be available to download from Passport Advantage or Partnerworld as usual.

[Originally posted over at stuart-mcintyre.com]

March 28, 2017 0 comment

6.0 Analysis Competition IBM Connections

IBM Connections 6 is coming soon… So what is the killer enhancement?

written by Stuart McIntyre

Earlier this week IBM published a press release previewing the headline features of the upcoming new on-premises release of Connections:

IBM today announced it is bringing new capabilities to enterprise social networks for a simpler collaboration across the workforce and employee onboarding experience. The latest version of IBM Connections also integrates with IBM Cloud Object Storage, providing companies an ability to scale their storage needs with their employee’s usage while improving storage costs.

The press release most notably included the GA date for Connections 6:

The newest version of IBM Connections will be available on March 28.

Some of the key new features are mentioned in the press release:

A new Homepage experience (known as called ‘Orient Me’) designed to do a better job of surfacing topical and relevant content from across the individual user’s network. This new feature makes use of a new containerised, API-driven architecture to select and display the most relevant information for the user, providing a more interactive experience that the old activity-stream Homepage ever offered.
Connections 6 also provides a “Touchpoint” onboarding experience for new users, offering a a more helpful and intuitive introductory process for new users, with easy login, ability to follow colleagues and join communities to begin working more efficiently. (A few years ago I discussed a previous iteration of the Touchpoint technology back when it was a paid asset offered by IBM Services.)
The ability to copy designs and layouts from existing communities enables more effective and standardised community management, as well as saving time when setting up new use cases.
An improved user experience for file access provides a simple to use interface and desktop sync for easier access to files, providing large file uploads, rich text editor, new preview/editing features in File Viewer and search improvements.
Integration with IBM Cloud Object Storage enables a hybrid option for Connections, storing the ever-increasing volumes of social data and allowing companies easy access to that information for analytics and new learning.

All these enhancements are valuable for loyal Connections customers and their employees, particularly the new Orient Me feature which has been needed for as long as I can remember. It’s similarity to the Verse user experience is pleasing for those that run both Verse and Connections, and I look forward to testing the effectiveness of the filters and AI-driven content selection when it becomes available. (I would still like to have seen more options for pushed Corporate Communications-style content, rather than what seems to be a sole focus on content from the user’s network, but we can’t have everything…)

However, in my mind there is no doubt that the single most important enhancement contained in Connections 6 is not mentioned at all in IBM’s communication, and so it is that which I want to explore here.

It’s all about the Use Case…

My methodology for deploying effective and engaging online communities is based on a foundation of well-defined use cases, developed by understanding the immediate needs of employees and community members within a specific context, the issues they face in their current workflows and business processes, and the cast and audience that are (or should be) engaged within the activity being analysed.

Some (very high-level) sample use cases could be:

A marketing team creating promotional campaign materials and delivering them to the sales channels
A sales team working together and working with supporting teams to respond to a tender with a proposal for products and services
A customer service team taking customer questions, finding the answers and responding to the customer
A corporate communications team communicating the strategy of the company to all employees
A research & development team creating new products and delivering them to the market

Once the use case is defined in detail, we move on to the containers, content types and interaction methods that will best support an improved approach within the online community. Lastly, we develop and publish wireframes that specify how use case content, calls to action and navigation will be surfaced within the community. Finally we build the defined use case within the technology, seed content and invite pilot users.

In this way, each and every use case has its own definition, interaction model, layout and flavour. Sure, common patterns are often a starting point (for example, communities of practice often follow a similar design and structure, no matter what the practice might be), but the look and feel of the use case will be different – the content types, calls to action, navigation and surfaced information will be specific and relevant to the use case supported.

This approach has always been difficult to implement in Connections. The definition phases could be undertaken, but when it came to delivering a customised experience for each use case that reflected the requirements of the audience, the process or workflow to be undertaken there, and the actions that users are being called to engage with, the static nature and feature-driven of the Connections community model was always a hindrance.

Here’s a relatively positive and visually appealing experience within a Connections community, taken from an IBM marketing screenshot:

Whilst the order of the widgets in the centre column can be customised, a graphical overview pane created, and a few of the community’s options tweaked, really every Connections ‘place’ will follow the same structure. Most critically, the various content types (blog posts, wiki articles, forum discussions etc.) can only be displayed in their specific widget, and with no real context as to how those content types should be used or when they are relevant. In addition, most follow a strict sort order, versus allowing curation by the community manager.

Look at how this differs from a similar Sales ‘place’ within a demo Jive environment:

The place owner gets to choose the column layout, the banner, the tile selection and placement, a variety of dynamic and static display options, including a number that allow curation of specific content, people, places and links.

In addition, each of the first four tabs on the place header (Overview, Sales Development, Field Sales and Sales Engineering) are different layouts surfacing content within this place and from around the community:

[Please note that I don’t hold the above Sales place up as a particularly great example of design or configuration in a Jive context, it’s just a pre-seeded place that I have available to screenshot, and is somewhat similar in purpose to the IBM example.]

This isn’t meant to bash Connections, both that product and Jive-n/x have their own advantages and disadvantages, but it’s always been apparent to me that if we want to encourage specific groups of users (say Sales) to adopt our platform, or wish to support their specific use cases (a need to onboard new salespeople more quickly and effectively), then we have to have a means to create a user experience that is relevant, engaging and carefully considered. This needs to be easier to create

So what’s the killer enhancement in Connections 6?

In Connections 6, place owners will finally get the ability to create truly modern communities that better support a wider variety of use cases:

IBM caveat: Designs subject to change

With new widget layouts, greater levels of customisation at the menu and design level, and a fresh new look, Connections 6 will allow community managers to create engaging places that suit the needs of their community members.

IBM caveat: Designs subject to change

Whilst Connections communities still have some way to go to match the level of place customisation, navigation and curation available in Jive, these new features do bring Connections much closer, and more importantly allow existing on-prem customers and community managers to immediately improve the user experience for their users.

As IBM continues forward towards the vision that is Connections Pink, I would love to see them continue to further develop the community layout model, allowing more visual widget options (for those vital Calls to Action) and widgets that enable selection of multiple content types (all content tagged ‘project’, or all content created in the past 7 days, or featured content as selected by the community manager etc.).

However, this is definitely a step in the right direction, and I look forward to working with the new functionality!

[Originally posted over at stuart-mcintyre.com]

March 15, 2017 0 comment

IBM Connect IBM Connections Pink

What not to miss at IBM Connect 2017: Connections Pink

written by Stuart McIntyre

IBM Connect 2017 takes place later this month in San Francisco, and the last-minute push to increase attendance is already underway. I’m a big fan of the new venue, and the shift from Florida to California, and so really hope that the event is a huge success.

One of the interesting aspects of the registration push has been the unveiling of some information that previously being kept relatively quiet – if not under NDA, certainly out of the limelight:

IBM Connections provides the platform of social tools you need to transform your organization. At IBM Connect you can explore the future of Connections including Connections Pink, in which virtually everything is an API, and continuous updates are achieved instantaneously. This collaboration platform learns and evolves with you, using cognitive computing provided by the power of Watson to give you more time to complete critical tasks and make your life a lot easier. This is the future of connectivity.
Highlighted Sessions
“What Is New and What Is Coming with IBM Connections”
Tuesday, 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM | Room 2011 | Session ID: 1305A
In this session, explore what’s new in the brand-new IBM Connections release and preview a few new features being planned for the next release. See first-hand how IBM Connections can work for you and how you can embrace all the new capabilities coming.
Speakers: Baan Slavens and Rene Schimmer, IBM
“The Future Is PINK: IBM Connections Your Way”
Wednesday, 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM | Room 2007 | Session ID: 1048A
Get an introduction to the PINK way of extending and customizing Connections – in the cloud and on-prem. PINK will allow you to work against modern APIs and easily adjust the behavior of Connections through powerful extensibility features. Come learn how!
Speakers: Andre Hagemeier and Maureen Leland, IBM

Connections Pink has been a rumour for a year or so now, and has been presented at a number of invite-only IBM events and conferences. I’ve not been an attendee at any of them, and so am still in the dark on a number of the architectural and implementation details. That said, what I have heard makes me extremely keen to hear the specifics when they are unveiled at Connect.

As you’ll know if you’ve followed me for any length of time, I’ve long been a huge fan of IBM Connections, and was probably one of the most vocal advocates for the technology over the first 5-6 years of its life.

Recently however, it’s been clear to me that there are some significant issues with the current releases of Connections that IBM have not been able (or perhaps willing) to overcome:

Complexity of the install, configuration and management of the platform (just listing the IBM framework products that Connections relies on takes a paragraph or two).
The length of time it takes to get an on-premises install configured and available for use.
The difficulty of making the codebase truly suitable for multi-tenant/SaaS use, which has lead to user-facing differences between the on-premises and cloud versions.
The complexity of developing third-party solutions that integrate with Connections, extensions that interface with Connections APIs, and applications that reside within the Connections UX.
The challenge of customising Connections on both on-premises (complex, difficult to maintain) and cloud platforms (limited) to truly suit an organisation’s needs.

That list above isn’t meant to bash IBM. Connections is still a massively powerful enabler for collaboration and communication. However, the issues listed have hindered Connections’ ability to deliver this value to organisations rapidly and then on a sustained basis, meanwhile the huge community developers (within partners and customers) that were used to creating solutions on Notes/Domino or other platforms have never been able to effectively transfer those skills to Connections.

My hope for Connections Pink is that the shift from Websphere to a platform built on well-known and understood open-source technologies that are easier to manage (‘continuous updates are achieved instantaneously‘), plus a real focus on ease of development and integration (‘virtually everything is an API‘) will once again make IBM Connections not just a platform that analysts consider to be one of the leaders in the market, but one that community managers, developers and end users are all passionate about and want to use.

I wish I could be at IBM Connect to hear this first-hand! However, I will be there virtually, watching all the sessions that are streamed and speaking to as many attendees as I can to get the lowdown on what is revealed.

So… Are you excited about Connections Pink? What are you expecting or hoping that IBM will announce?

[Originally posted over at stuart-mcintyre.com]

February 1, 2017 0 comment

IBM Connections Lotusphere

T’was ten years ago… (Lotus Connections & Quickr)

written by Stuart McIntyre

Unfortunately I’ve just missed the actual anniversary, but I thought it worth celebrating that this week marks a decade since the announcement (on 22nd January 2007) of two products that have had an immense impact on my working life, ~~Lotus~~ IBM Connections and Lotus Quickr.

Lotusphere 2007

I was relatively late to the Lotusphere party, attending my first US-based event in 2004 after a couple of the European events. Therefore I never experienced the sell-out 10,000 attendee events pre 9/11. Even so, in comparison to the events I had taken part in, it was clear that 2007 was set to be a significant milestone for the IBM/Lotus brand.

The context for Lotusphere 2007 was that whilst (thankfully) the days of the ‘two-lane highway‘ of IBM Workplace were drawing to a close, Notes and Domino were suffering for the lack of investment that had been caused whilst funds were being channeled elsewhere, and ever more Lotus personnel were being consumed into the wider IBM organisation with every quarter that passed.

Despite (or perhaps as a result of) this somewhat overcast outlook, the energy around the Lotusphere 2007 event was huge, with real expectation of significant announcements being made on all product fronts. This was an opportunity for IBM to recommit to the products in the portfolio, as well as laying out a new strategy for collaboration in the years ahead. More than 7,000 attended, and as a result the auditorium was packed for the OGS, with IBMers shipped off to a second room.

My personal circumstances were that I’d just returned to the Lotus partner community after a year away working at a primarily HP-focused ITIL/systems management consultancy, and had re-committed to collaboration, unified communications and personal productivity technology as the core tenets of my career going forward. I was ready for IBM to kick on with their plans for what had been the Lotus business and hoping for a set of announcements that would enable me to build solutions for my customers for years to come.

The Opening General Session

It was with this in mind that the 2007 event kicked off with what was undoubtedly the most memorable Opening General Session I ever experienced:

Guest speaker Neil Armstrong. The most famous astronaut of all time tells the story of going up to the moon and setting up mirrors that would allow scientists to measure it’s distance from earth ‘so that the astronauts could know how much mileage to put on their expense accounts.’ The mirrors have been used numerous times since for experiments and research.After dozens of guest speakers at Lotusphere and other major tech conferences, there’s no doubt in my mind that Neil Armstrong set the highest bar in terms of gravitas and story-telling, and I still remember his presence on stage a few meters from me like it was yesterday!
UC2 – Unified Communications and Collaboration. IBM takes the existing Domino-based Sametime chat and meetings product and layers on Eclipse clients plus technology that is designed to make IM and presence a core component of the collaboration solutions of the future.
Dropping Hannover code name, Notes 8 beta announced. ‘Hannover’ had been previewed back in 2005 at the DNUG conference, laying out a vision a new generation Notes client UI/UX, built on the Eclipse framework. At Lotusphere 2007, Hannover was formally announced as the forthcoming Notes 8 release, and was made available as a beta for existing customers.
There were also the expected OGS segments for Portal, development tools and so on.

In their own right, the UC2 and Notes 8 announcements would have been pretty significant, if not ground-breaking, news for the Lotus faithful. However, what ratcheted up the importance of this keynote for me was the final two announcements (at least that was the timing as far as I recall…):

Lotus Quickr. Lotus Quickplace had been part of the portfolio since 1999, a web-based collaborative project-management platform, based on Domino (but not requiring the users to have Notes clients). Sadly, in the early- to mid-noughties, like a number of other Lotus products, Quickplace had been allowed to languish in somewhat of an unloved state. Briefly renamed to Lotus Team Workplace (and then returned to the original moniker again soon after), Quickplace regularly fell out of version step with its Domino host, and in some ways, the promise of a business user-administered team collaboration platform was never quite realised due to tricky administration and a somewhat esoteric UI. In the meantime, Microsoft had been seeding Sharepoint into their user base via the ‘free free free’ Sharepoint Services offering, and Quickplace was under real pressure.However, Lotusphere 2007 saw IBM attempting to bring the product up to date with a bang! Taking the lead from the cool internet services of the day, IBM gave it a funky new name (missing a vowel, of course), Quickr, a new vision based on a modern web UI that could interface with a variety of storage backends (Portal, Domino, and in theory at least, Sharepoint), and a desktop component that allowed users (on Windows) to access and to drag/drop files directly to and from their Quickr repository.

What captured even more attention was a couple of somewhat throw-away announcements at the end of the Quickr demos. First, the Notes client intercepting the sending of an email to suggest to the user that files were better shared via Quickr links rather than as attachments, and second, the availability of a personal version of Quickr for every licensed Notes user.It’s fair to say the Quickr announcement was hugely exciting for the potential it offered. Quickplace had shown promise for years, but was losing out in the market. Lotus Quickr showed that IBM realised this, and were prepared to invest significant funds in taking the core competency of the Domino-based product and building on new server and client functionality to give Microsoft Sharepoint a decent competitor again.

Lotus Connections. Closing out the OGS, almost in a Steve Jobs-esque “One More Thing” style was an announcement that completely took my breath away. Whilst IBM had been rumoured to be working on a new platform for a while, codenamed “Project Ventura”, I knew very few of the details, and hadn’t thought it to be anywhere near ready to release.Yet here was IBM describing the rise of social media in the past couple of years, Time Magazine’s recent announcement of ‘You’ as their Person of the Year, the need for new ways to connect, collaborate and share, and the organisation’s own shift from email toward interactive social platforms.

What followed was the unveiling of Lotus Connections, ‘the first-ever integrated social software platform for business’.

At that stage, Connections was a somewhat primitive set of little-integrated social services – Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Bookmarks (‘Dogear’) and Activities.

Built on IBM’s own nascent W3 social applications, at this stage there was no home page, no activity streams, no status updates, no file sharing, no wikis etc, what was shown was really very basic.And yet there was so much potential! A fresh, modern, attractive web UI. The complexities of the underlying infrastructure hidden from end users, no need for costly and complex client rollouts, a shift away from the productivity scourge of email, and a platform for a new culture of openness and sharing.

This was all so hugely captivating!

At that stage of my career, I was already increasingly cynical about the state of email and traditional collaboration tools. Yet I was also experienced enough to understand the realities of corporate business requirements, the challenges that both the LoB and IT folks faced, and the massive pent up demand for individuals to take ownership of their personal knowledge, expertise and productivity, their career growth and their relationships with team colleagues and those further afield.

Lotus Connections ticked so many of those boxes. Whilst the release of the product was still 6 months away, I knew that Connections (and tools like it) had to be the core component of my future career.

Finding my voice

What’s more, there and then in the OGS, I also realised that I’d found the voice for which I had spent the past couple of years searching… I was already convinced that I didn’t have enough expertise to blog about email, Notes or Domino – just spending a little time in the company of Chris, Paul, Bill, Ed or Alan made me more than aware of that.

But Quickr and Connections? I could see the potential, the relevance and the possibilities. What’s more, I was on the same start line as anyone else outside of IBM (well, with the honourable exception of Rob!), and I was desperate to found out more about these new products, and to share what I had learnt.

So before I’d even left the Dolphin Ballroom that morning, I’d registered lotusconnectionsblog.com, quickrblog.com and number of other related domains. Within a week or so, those sites were in a state where I could ask Ed to share them via his own blog, and subsequently became the gateway to my taking up a role within the Lotus community I love so much. [Sadly, as a result of joining Jive back in 2015, I had to let those domains expire, but many of the posts are still kept for posterity here on stuart-mcintyre.com.]

Within a couple of months I was part of both the Connections and Quickr beta programs, within a year I’d started my own business (Collaboration Matters) and was soon consulting on Connections and Quickr for my own customers. By 2009 I was presenting on Connections at the Lotusphere event itself. I can trace all that back to the announcements in 2007.

A decade on…

Looking back now on that keynote at Lotusphere 2007, it’s not difficult to find oneself comparing it to the iPhone unveiling that was made just a couple of weeks earlier. That Steve Jobs keynote has passed into folklore – I’m not alone in stating it was the best and most important product announcement I’ve ever seen (‘three devices – widescreen iPod, mobile phone, internet communicator – are you getting it yet?‘). You can map out a world pre-iPhone and post-iPhone and the intersection was that presentation on 9th January 2007.

You won’t find many tech folks holding up the Lotusphere 2007 keynote in a similar vein, and yet for me personally, it was literally life-changing!

Lotus Connections showed the way ahead, for the industry, for organisations that desperately needed improved collaboration, and for my career.

A decade on, I’m even more passionate for digital transformation, for the potential of online community, and for the role of platforms like Connections in revolutionising corporate culture and collaboration. I owe Lotusphere 2007 and IBM Connections a huge debt of thanks.

Happy Birthday, IBM Connections!

[Originally posted over at stuart-mcintyre.com]

January 27, 2017 0 comment