This is the second of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. After covering Connections 3.0 as I discussed in my last post, we covered aspects of the next major release.
There are three main themes addressed in this next release of Connections: the evolution of the social platform, enhanced communities for teams, and more capabilities for business to consumer use cases. The common underlying theme is the movement from Connections providing a suite of applications to becoming a comprehensive social business platform with tighter integration.
One of the enablers of this tighter integration is the use of Connections with the OpenSocial Foundation, a standards board that IBM and other firms such as Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and Jive collaboratively develop or utilize. Here is the list of OpenSocial adopters. The Wikipedia defines the OpenSocial Platform as a “public specification that defines a component hosting environment (container) and a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based applications.” This effort is designed to give social tools the ability to work together, a wise move.
Looking more closely at the three themes, the social platform evolution is designed to address the need to streamline work, provide anytime, anywhere access, prioritize important content and filter out distractions, and offer a consistent integrated collaboration experience. The enhanced community capabilities for teams add new features to address team use cases. This includes support for the need to share and collaborate across a group of people, to support different groups with different requirements, and to develop and manage shared documents across teams. The business to consumer capabilities accommodates the need to build social communities to enhance loyalty and revenue, to understand what works and gain insight from trends, and support openness and choice. Here is a sample Connections dashboard.
One of the major advances on the social platform evolution is the enhancement of the activity stream. I really applaud this move as I see the activity stream becoming the glue that holds the social enterprise together and make it run efficiently. To this end IBM has made its Connections activity stream open to third party apps. For example, an approval request from an SAP application can be placed into the activity stream and acted upon without leaving the activity stream. This is the type of capability that will truly enable the connected enterprise. Here is a sample activity stream.
IBM has contributed this embedded experience capability into the OpenSocial Foundation so others can use it. So to be more specific you can take an item from a backend system, such as the SAP tracking order I mentioned, and place it into a side bar within a Connections activity stream. There it can be worked on and the results sent back to the backend system without the user actually having to go there. The capability has opened doors for IBM to make stronger connections with other members of Open Social such as Atlassian.
IBM wants the activity stream to become the central workplace and I fully support this concept. You can have both manual updates like Twitter or auto-generated updates such as the SAP example. It is light years ahead of email as a central workplace and you can even bring email and calendar from Exchange or Domino into Connections. You can work on emails within Connections just as you can back-office tasks like SAP. It is becoming truly capable of being the central work place of the enterprise but with a social twist. You can even give feedback on items through the ”like” feature and follow conversation through hashtags. Because of the embedded files capability you can also display images right in the activity stream unlike in Twitter. Here is sample screen with email inside Connections.
In my next post, which will appear tomorrow, I will look more closely at the analytics that is coming with the next release of Connections
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