Overview
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.
It was an excellent opportunity to share some of the work IBMers are doing using social media tools, for the past 5 years now! We have lots of social media tools (see slide above), some stay as research projects while others grow up and become IBM solutions (such as our social software solution – Lotus Connections).
