ibm lotus connections overview

© 2008 IBM Corporation

®

IBM Innovation Center – Dallas, TX

Social Computing with Lotus Connections Workshop

Overview

Updated: August292008

Connections Overview | Lotus Connections Workshop | Dallas Innovation Center

Slide 2

Agenda

Why Social Software for business?

IBM Lotus® Connections 2.5

How does Lotus Connections help me?

How is Lotus Connections integrated with everyday

tools?

Q & A


WikiBlogs

Social Networks

AJAX

RSS

Mash-ups

Social Computing

MySpace

Tags

Web 2.0

del.icio.us

Flickr

REST

ATOM

LinkedIn

folksonomy

Consumerization

Diggbookmarking

Communities

Video Sharing

Avatars

Facebook

Why should my business care?

Making sense out of Web 2.0


Social Networking, Blogs, wikis ……

"It will eventually be seen as essential to all large firms, encouraging more

open and transparent communications with staff around the world, and helping

to improve relations with existing and potential customers."

Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner, July 2008

“Study encourages businesses to embrace social networking”www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2221395/study-encourages-businesses

“When it comes to using Web 2.0 collaboration tools, the momentum is behind

wikis, blogs, and social networking, though primarily among co-workers. Some

70% of InformationWeek 500 companies say their employees are using those

tools this year, compared with 55% last year.”

InformationWeek 500, September 2008

“Trends Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More”www.informationweek.com/news/management/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2106010984


Increasingly, workers of all ages & roles find themselves “virtual”

83% of IT Executives consider their company to be a virtual workplace (up from 57% in 2006)

91% of employees work in locations other

than headquarters

The number of virtual workers has increased

by 800% from 2000-2005

Source: Building the Successful Virtual Workplace, 2007,Getting a Grip on Collaboration, 2005

Nemertes Research Inc.

We connect more often across the Web than across the table…


How to find the right people and information

Work environments are more complex

Work environments are more disconnected

More interactions with unknown people


Need to Improve Business Execution & Reuse Best Practices

Most work today involves dynamic processes being delivered by dispersed groups of people

Making business decisionsinvolves more than just traditional IT applications

–Emails / Faxes / Forms

–Instant Message Chats

–Team Discussions

–Web Pages, Documents, Presentations, or Spreadsheets

–Web Conferences

People need simple ways to structure adhoc activities and harvest best practice templates for the future

Adapted from: *C. Hill, R. Yates, C. Jones, S. Kogan, Beyond predictable workflows: Enhancing productivity in artful business processes, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, 2006, http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/454/hill.html


IBM Lotus® Connections 2.5


IBM Lotus® Connections social software

Lotus Connections is

social software for

business that

empowers you to be

more innovative and

helps you execute

more quickly by

using dynamic

networks of

coworkers, partners

and customers.

Communities

Blogs DogearActivities

Profiles

Home page

WikisFiles


Communities

Create, find, join, and work with communities of people who share a common interest, responsibility, or area of expertise

Blogs

A personal content publishing tool

to present your ideas and get

feedback from others; learn from

the expertise and experience of

others who blog

Bookmarks

Save, organize and share

bookmarks; discover

bookmarks that have been

qualified by others with similar

interests & expertise

Activities

Organize your work, plan next

steps, and easily tap your

expanding professional network

to help execute your everyday

deliverables, faster

Profiles

Quickly find the people you

need by searching across your

organization and connecting to

others. Status updates keeps

others informed.

Homepage

Manage your attention by

viewing relevant social data

aggregated across your

subscriptions, notifications, and

network of colleagues.

WikisFiles

Upload and share any type of file

with colleagues and

communities. Store versions and

view downloads, comments and

ratings.

Create wiki spaces for

individuals, groups, and

communities to coauthor pages.

View changes across pages,

ratings, and comments.

All your social software needsready for business


Slide 11

What’s new in Lotus Connections 2.5

Wiki Service

A new Lotus Connections wiki feature lets you create wiki sites to

collectively author documents with others.

Files Service

Connections files makes sharing files with other people a snap

Mobile access

Support for mobile browser to Lotus Connections Profiles from

iPhone or Nokia s60 device.

Micro-blogging

Profiles now features status updates and a profile "board" that lets

you easily post messages to other users' profiles.


Slide 12

What’s changed in Lotus Connections 2.5

Evolution of Communities

– Any Community can include:

• A discussion Forum, Shared Bookmarks, Shared Feeds

• Activities,A Community Blog,Community Files, Wikis

– Community discussion forums have a new look and now show the number of replies for each topic. Community owners can customize the look of their community and move widgets around on the community home page.

Federated Updates Across ConnectionsThe Connections home page keeps you informed with the new Updatestab. You can discover contributions across all Lotus Connections services (including the micro-blogging Status Updates).

Federated SearchEasily search all Connections applications, and filter by tags, person, or time range. Or scope your search to a specific service, such as Profiles.


Slide 13

Profiles

Status Updates in Profiles

– Experts, teammates, and others share progress, share new discoveries, ask questions

– I stayed informed, listen to the wisdom of the crowd, and discover new ideas/information/assets

– I share with others so they know if I’m working on something that might help them

Profiles: Helps me understand holistically who someone is

– Enterprise Info and Social Information

– Social contributions, conversations on user’s Board

Federated Status Updates

– Staying Informed on changes in my Network

– Discovering information and people helps me be innovative and leverage the work of others


Slide 14

Conversational Collaboration –“microblogging”

Asking your Network

Letting others stay informed on my work

What My Network is doing and

saying


Slide 15

360 Degrees of Me …and You

Building My Professional

Network

How the Enterprise Describes

MeHow I

Describe Me

Who I work for

Who am I outside of

Work

What I’ve been Contributing

How others describe me

Putting a Face to a

Name

What am I doing Now

The History of My

Conversations


Slide 16

Staying informed by leveraging My Network

My Network

The Entire Enterprise

Tracking Experts and Information

“nodes”


Slide 17

Discover People and Share Information

Discover experienced people – through Profiles

Contact experts using Profiles

Invite discussion and feedback using Blogs

Discover people’s knowledge through blogs


Slide 18

Profile Value & Strategy

Expanded customized profile data fields and views for your

organization

Improve your ability to identify, develop and maintain relationships

within your professional network

Expand social networks by allowing you to identify your colleagues

and easily stay in touch

Aggregate all your social data in one place for others to easily

discover your work


Slide 19

Colleagues

– Invitations to connect

– integrated with SMTP server

– Updates from your colleagues through Atom feeds

Tagging

– Tag yourself and others

– View network by tag

Customization

– Widgets to display custom fields and external data

Business Card

– Built to be integrated into other applications

Profiles Features


Slide 20


Slide 21

What is a Blog?

A Weblog or a blog is a website where entries are made in journal style

and displayed in a reverse chronological order

The power of blogs is that they allow individuals to easily publish their

ideas, and a lot more to comment on them

Blogs is a key tool for social networking providing medium to share

knowledge and build relationships

Blogs can help facilitate and unlock the expertise of individuals within an

organization, internally or externally


Slide 22

Blogging Options

– Post to more than one blog, internally and externally

– Team blogs

– Moderated

Multiple Views

– Date,Title

– Most Recommended, Commented, Visited

Flexible Search

– Author, Comment, Content, Tag, Title

Blog Value Strategy


Slide 23


Slide 24

Business is constantly changing. How can Lotus Connections help me work moreeffectively and share best practices?

PRACTICESWork Efficiently


Slide 25

What Is Activities

An activity is a way for you to organize your work and collaborate with

others in a shared web space

The Activities Service, or server, is a Web Application running in the

WebSphere J2EE Container

Designed to help you organize the information and the people you

need

Makes it easy to:

– Track your work with a dashboard

– Invite and share your tasks with others

– Manage to-dos that you and your team have

– Discover and share best practices by creating activity templates

– Effectively execute on assignments


Slide 26

Activity Value & Strategy

Organize and aggregate resources to plan and guide work, respond

and take action

Leverage your network to execute ideas faster and reuse best

practices through activity templates

Identify critical and timely Activities in revised dashboard view

Organize your activities in personalized views


Slide 27

Customizable Organization

– Collect entries into sections

– Assign properties to any entry (on-the-fly ‘forms’), and associate

them with specific sections

Templates

– Build reusable human processes and task ‘good practices’

Customization

Publish finished work to IBM Lotus Quickr

Activities Features


Slide 28

Activities


Slide 29

CommunitiesBringing together people with common interests to discuss relevant issues, and poll colleagues to get information

Connect with specific communities

– Defines groups of people with a common interest or work

objective

– Ability to create, find, join, communicate with and leverage

specific communities based on expertise and interests

– Find communities with common interests

– View the Community goals and how to interact with the

community

– Navigate to the community’s blog posts, bookmarks and

feeds

– Use email and broadcast tools to contact members of the

community


Slide 30

Community & Value Strategy

Promotes discussion among community members and knowledge sharing by subject matter experts

Aggregates information from across Lotus Connections and external resources

Provides access to advanced community collaboration tools with a common membership list

Allows you to address the community in external applications, like email

Provides simple integration for any community to access other applications like wikis or teamrooms


Slide 31

Communities


Slide 32

Information is all over the place. How can Lotus Connections help me be more effective at finding information that is valuable and relevant?

Finding Information


Slide 33

Dogear Options

– Add a bookmark to Dogear, Communities, Activities, and Blogs in

one step

– Flag as broken URL

– Notify others

– Import existing browser and del.icio.us bookmarks, export Dogear

bookmarks

– Replace and delete tags across your bookmarks

Multiple Views

– By: Date, Popularity, Most Visited, Person, Tag, Personal Watchlist

Flexible Search

– All Bookmarks, My Bookmarks

– By Person, By Tag

Dogear Features


Slide 34

Dogear


Slide 35

Social data is ever expanding. How do I keep track of it all?

Accesing from Oneplace


Slide 36

Homepage Value & Strategy

Keep up to date using your social Homepage

Delivers an aggregated view of latest Lotus Connections information

Improves your ability to track critical information and people

Eases management of your incoming requests and tasks

Provides faster access to your rapidly expanding social capital


Slide 37

Homepage


Slide 38

Agenda

What is Lotus Connections?

How does it help me?

How is it Integrated into my Everyday Tools?

Technical Overview


Slide 39

Out-of-box access from multiple clients:

– Browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari*)‏

– Inbox (Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook*)‏

– Word processing/spreadsheet/presentation tools (Microsoft Office,

Lotus Symphony)‏

– Instant messaging clients (Lotus Sametime)‏

– Portals (WebSphere Portal, JSR 168 portlet)‏

– Mobile devices (Windows Mobile*, BlackBerry*, others)‏

– Team collaboration sites (Lotus Quickr*, Microsoft SharePoint*)

Designed to be integrated with other applications

– REST-style API (Atompub/ASF)

– SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.

Available access points


Slide 40

Agenda

What is Lotus Connections?

How does it help me?

How is it Integrated into my Everyday Tools?

Technical Overview


Slide 41

Lotus Connections Functional Topology

Corporate LDAP

Directory(ITDS 6, MS Active Directory

2003, Domino 7/8, SunOne)

Lotus Connections ServiceRequires IBM WebSphere® Application Server

6.1.0.13 on:

• Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 4

• Microsoft Windows 2003 Server

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Intel

• IBM AIX 5.3 64 bit OS

Relational Database(IBM DB2® 9.1 software, Oracle

10G, and Microsoft SQL 2005)

Access Points• Browsers

• IBM Lotus Notes®

• IBM Lotus Sametime®

• IBM WebSphere Portal

• IBM Lotus Quickr*

• Web applications

• Microsoft Office

• Microsoft Outlook*

One or more

services …• Activities

• Profiles

• Dogear

• Blogs

• Communities

• Homepage*

* Coming H1 2008


Slide 42

Six Enterprise Services


Slide 43

Supported Software

Server side operating system

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Enterprise Server V4.0 on x86-32

Microsoft Windows 2003 Server - Standard

Microsoft Windows 2003 Server – Enterprise

SUSE Enterprise Server 10

AIX 5.3.0.4 and later

Web browser support

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and later

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac)

Application server

IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1.0.13

HTTP Server

IBM HTTP Server from WebSphere Application Server V6.1.0.13 (IHS)

LDAP DirectoryIBM Tivoli Directory Server (ITDS)

6.0.0.3Lotus Domino 7.0.2 and laterMicrosoft Active Directory 2003

Service Pack 2Sun Java System Directory Server

5.2Database

IBM DB2 V9.1 Fix Pack 2Oracle 10g 10.2.0.3Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Enterprise


Slide 44

Additional Information

Lotus Connections (www.ibm.com/lotus/connections)

– Latest product info

– Research

– Podcasts

– and more

http://www.ibm.com/lotus/connections


Slide 45

Demo


Slide 46

Summary

Lotus Connections main features

How Lotus Connections helps

Integration with other tools

Technical Overview

ibm lotus connections overview

Documents

social computing

wiki service

ibm systemsjournal

ibm corporation

right people

business decisionsinvolves

unknown people

people youcreate