IBM Insight 2014 is 2 Weeks Away -- Add These Sessions To Your Schedule

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IBM Insight is now two weeks away.  I'll have the opportunity to go this year and update the audience on IBM Connections and what we are doing there when it comes to the combination of content management + team collaboration.

This year, I'll be co-presenting with my colleague, Firas Yasin, one of our social business advocates and an expert when it comes to adoption, business value and content management.

 Our session is on Monday right after the keynote at Lagoon J.  Last night, I was going through the attendee list for our session and found this enrollee record:

Check out the job title.  What an awesome job title, right? I can't wait to have a conversation with that person.  While you are at the conference, check out these other sessions:

• IBM Connections and Enterprise Content Management: The Best of Both Worlds - Monday, 10:15am, Lagoon J
• What's the Latest News on Watson Content Analytics, Monday, 11:30am, Lagoon K
• IBM Enterprise Content Management Products and Solutions Strategy, Monday, 3:30p, Mandalay Bay AB
• Building Apps with IBM Social Media Analytics, Tuesday, 3:00pm, Reef C
• Unleashing Enterprise Transformation through Social & Mobile Insights, Tuesday, 4:30p, Mandalay Bay H
• How to Fit Mobile, Social, and Cloud Into Your ECM Strategy, Wednesday, 1:45pm, Lagoon H
• Collaborate Faster and Securely with IBM Docs, Content Navigator and Connections - Wednesday, 4:30p, Lagoon D
• Get the Most Value From IBM Connections Enterprise Content Edition and IBM Connections Content Manager - Thursday, 10:00am, Lagoon B
• Collaborate Faster and Securely with IBM Docs, Content Navigator and Connections - Thursday, 1:45pm, Lagoon H

I'll also be at the demo ped.... At the following times:

• Monday 12:30p - 1:30p
• Tuesday 2:30p - 3:30p
• Wednesday 1:30p - 2:30p

And don't forget, ex-MythBusters Grant Imahara will be there and you definitely don't want to miss that one!

If you are going to the conference, let me know so we can get together. See you there!

Announcing the IBM Connections Suite - Sweet !

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IBM has just announced its new social business offering: the IBM Connections Suite. The IBM Connections Suite provides the best of the best communications, content, and social capabilities in one package creating the ultimate social business offering.

How does a business become a social business? IBM has identified a foundational set of capabilities that—when implemented as a whole—can allow your business to become more social. To socially enable your workforce, improve customer care and insight, and enhance product and service innovation, an organization must consider how it will Reach, Engage, Discover, and Act as it becomes a social business. These are the 4 key services of a social business.

- Reach people where they live and work

- Enable people to engage productively in a business context

- Monitor and analyze social data to discover new business insights

- Act on insight for business advantage

The IBM Connections Suite delivers these 4 capabilities, and it's all in one package! What does it include? Everyhing you could want: profiles, communities, microblogging soft phone / VoIP, presence awareness, instant messaging, web meetings, video, forums, wikis, social analytics, blogs, media gallery, ideation, real-time collaboration with communities, peer to peer file sharing, document libraries, mobile apps, and more!

To demonstrate some of the capabilities provided by the IBM Connections Suite, I've created three demos. Each demo shows how the IBM Connections Suite delivers business value and helps companies achieve one of three outcomes: workforce optimization, improving customer care processes, and accelerate innovation.

Demo 1 - IBM Connections Suite for Workforce Optimization

Demo 2 - IBM Connections Suite for Customer Care

Demo 3 - IBM Connections Suite for Accelerating Innovation

Of course, it's hard to show the 300+ features that are in the IBM Connections Suite in a couple of 5 minutes videos, so I'll be interested in knowing what you would like me to show more of. Please let me know in the comments below.

The announcement letter with more details, can be found here.

New Bundle Available: Connections & FileNet

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Today, IBM announced a new bundle where customers can buy IBM Connections + FileNet for a significant discount.

You may remember that one of the new features that was introduced in IBM Connections 3.0.1 was integration with FileNet. The integration brings the power, security, and scalability of an Enterprise Content Manager (ECM). With this integration you can use folders, check-in/check-out, workflow, document types and even round-trip editing natively within Connections (the last feature being my favorite ).

Why are we doing this?

Today's business environment is information and knowledge intensive. Today's social tools are designed to help you to leverage this exponential growth of information. Reliable content is essential, and connecting the right subject matter experts with the right content gives businesses real-time information in context - helping contribute to better business decisions made more efficiently. IBM Connections Content Edition V3 integrates IBM Connections' best-in-class social software with the IBM industry-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform in a single affordable offering. This offering enables you to extend ECM services and function to a broad audience of business professionals using social software to help achieve their business goals.

Here's a demo of the integration (or you can view it full screen here):

And here's another one in HTML5 just in case you can't see the one above:

The new offering is called IBM® Connections Content Edition V3 and you can find the official announcement letter is here.

New Quickr for Portal Integration with Connections

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A new widget for IBM Connections is now available which brings the Quickr for WebSphere Portal document library into a Connections community.

The widget augments the original Quickr widget because it maintains the user in the Connections environment, whereas the other widget would make the user switch back and forth. It's also nice because you can link to existing Quickr document libraries (or if you don't want to map a community to an existing Quickr library, you can make it so that a new document library is created and membership is synchronized). And just like the SharePoint and ECM widgets to communities, you have full access to the entire document library directly from Connections. You no longer need to go back and forth between the two.

Moreover, similar to the ECM widget for communities, the widget allows round-trip editing of documents stored in Quickr. I particularly like the ability to check-in/check-out documents directly from Connections as well as uploading documents of a specific document type and entering the metadata as required by Quickr, again all seamlessly happening from Connections. With this integration, a community in Connections becomes a place where members can come in and collaborate on files regardless of where they are stored: SharePoint, Connections, Quickr, or ECM.

Here's a screenshot that shows how it works:

  

To download the widget, you can get from free here in the Lotus App Catalog. Note in the instructions the additional system requirements you need to install.

Updated iOS App Now Available for Quickr 8.5

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iOS users re-joice! Snapps has just published an update to their SnappFiles application in the iTunes App Store. SnappFiles for Quickr is a business app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that allows you to access your Quickr places and files directly from your iPhone, iPod Touch and/or iPad. No modifications to your server are required at all; just point to the server, log in, and start browsing. The app is tremendously popular with reports that is being used by an elected President of a country.

The latest update published is version 1.0.5 which includes the following new features:

• Support for IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5.1 for both Domino and Portal
• Support for IBM Content Manager 8 (CM8) with Content Manager Services for Lotus Quickr installed
• Support for IBM FileNet P8 with FileNet Services for Lotus Quickr installed
• Support for IBM Social ECM Bundle
• Downloaded files can be opened in other registered apps, whether viewable by the native device viewer or not (iOS 3.2 and higher) — for instance, a non-viewable zip file may be opened in the Dropbox app, or a viewable PDF stored in iBooks
• Runs as a background app (iOS 4.0 and higher)
• Experimental support for Alfresco Open Source ECM, Documentum, and OpenText with third party integration for Lotus Quickr installed

I've been using the app now for a couple of weeks and like it a lot. It allows me to use Quickr as Dropbox for the Enterprise. I can easily browse and navigate my files. I find it really useful when I go to customer sites, pull down a presentation stored in Quickr and present directly from my iPad.

And speaking of Dropbox, the new version allows you to save downloaded files into Dropbox. In fact, this new version allows you to open downloaded files with any app that supports the "Open in..." dialog box in your iOS device, for example, iBooks for viewing PDFs (as seen below).

I believe access to your mobile documents on the go is key to driving adoption and accelerating your process in becoming a social business. Therefore, this app is must-have! To download it, you can get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snappfiles/id352215859?mt=8

If you've never seen SnappFiles in action, take a peek at the demo movie here (which doesn't show the new features yet):

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Article first published as Updated iOS App for Quickr Now Available in iTunes App Store on Technorati.

2 New Videos: Moderation and ECM Integration in Connections 3.0.1

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There are now 2 new videos that have been published in the IBM Connections wiki. These videos cover the new Moderation capabilities introduced in Connections 3.0.1 as well as the new ECM integration introduced in that release.

Just before Connections 3.0 was released, the Information Development team had already published ~10 videos demonstrating the various capabilities of the system.

Here's the moderation video:

To view the moderation video in full size go here. To view the ECM video, go here.

Kudos to the Information Development team who has done a tremendous job getting all these videos out there.If you still need to catch up, the full list of videos can be found here.

Enjoy!

Download Now: IBM Connections 3.0.1

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The latest version of the Connections product is now available for download: 3.0.1 only . If my math is correct, this is the 10th major release for the product in the last 4 years and it comes only 130 days since our last release which was 3.0.

So what's new in 3.0.1? Tons! Here's a recap of what was announced at Lotusphere and is now available:

Media Gallery for sharing and viewing media in a community
The Media Gallery feature permits community members to upload and share images and videos for viewing within a community. The Media Gallery page displays thumbnails of the multimedia content in your community's media gallery. You can see who uploaded a file and when the file was last updated. You can also see how many people have downloaded or commented on a file, and preview photos or videos using the gallery previewer.

Ideation Blog for sharing, commenting, and voting on ideas in a community
The Ideation Blog feature is designed to help make it simpler for community members to post new ideas, vote on them, and turn them into projects. A community owner can choose to add the Ideation Blog feature to their community. Community members can then post new ideas to the Ideation Blog. As new ideas are added, community members can post comments and cast votes for their favorite ideas. An Activity can be created for promising ideas so that work can proceed on turning the idea into reality. This feature can be used, for example, to gather suggestions from customers on how to improve products.

New community content moderation capabilities
Community owners can moderate content using pre-moderation or post-moderation. Pre-moderation enables a community owner to approve or reject content before it appears in the community. With post-moderation, a community member can flag content as inappropriate. This action sends a notification to the community owner who can then review the flagged item and take appropriate action by quarantining the content or dismissing the flag.

Integration with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories
The ECM integration allows users to store, access, and edit documents residing in FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Manager from within a Community.

Integration with IBM Lotus® Sametime® server
The IBM Lotus Sametime server integration allows users to collaborate in real time from IBM Connections.

Suzanne Livingston has created a demo that shows all the new features.

You have several options when installing 3.0.1:

• Upgrade directly from 2.5
• Apply as a fixpack on top of 3.0
• Install 3.0.1 directly (ie. if you are new to Connections, there's no need to install 3.0 first)

I installed 3.0.1 last week and the process went super smooth. One thing that caught me was that I forgot to configure the AJAX proxy for my ECM server. So don't forget to do that after you install 3.0.1.
If you want to learn more, I'll be presenting about Connections 3.0.1 and its extensibility options at IBM's Impact #ibmimpact conference in Las Vegas next week. Both of my sessions are on Wednesday. I'll also be manning the Exceptional Work Experience ped. Hope to see you there!
So go on and download and enjoy!

Quickr Customers: I Need Your Feedback

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As we continue to finalize plans for the next release of Quickr, we want to make sure that we are listening to all of our customers and deliver the best product that meets the demands of our customers and beats our competition. To that end, I've created a survey to quickly gather feedback from all of our customers.

Between now and March 25th, I would like to request ~8 minutes of your time to go through and answer some quick questions. This survey will help us understand how our customers are using Quickr.

Also, while I have your attention, I also wanted to let you know of a webcast that's available which covers our strategy for integrating ECM and Collaboration. If you haven't seen it yet, here's the replay:

To access the survey, please click here and log in with your IBM ID. I really really appreciate your time and support. And remember, please complete the survey today! (or by March 25th)