Calling IBM Social Business Partners

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One of the things that I've been working on in my new role, along with many colleagues, is on a new program for our business partners.

On Friday, IBM started to offer a Social Business Authorization where Business Partners can certify as Social Business partners. I thought this was interesting because the authorization (or certificaions, depending on how you want to call it) is focused more on demonstrated skills than on actual certifications (i.e. passing tests). There is, however, a requirement to pass certain mastery tests.

The authorization also includes offerings from different brands in the IBM portfolio for a complete Social Business offering. The idea is that a partner must know how to work with Connections but also with the complementary offerings from Cognos and/or SPSS.

If you would like to be part of this new authorization, or want to learn about the benefits, you can find out more about in PartnerWorld here. The list of mastery tests is included here.

How To Build a Status Update application for Facebook, Twitter and Connections using Portlet Factory

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Because I've shared so many Connections coding tips and how-to's, I'm often asked to help provide some guidance on how to create an application from scratch that integrates Connections with product X.

This video came to my attention last week and it's pretty cool. It starts with a demo of what the application is (a portlet that can simultaneously update your status in Connections, Twitter and Facebook, if enabled by the end user).

There are several things that really stand out in this demo. First, I really liked how the video shows that you can use the standard Java library provided by Twitter. Second, the demo shows how this same application looks like from an iPhone (or any mobile device) with no additional coding. The only thing that had to happen was to add the 'mobile theme' in portlet factory and voilá.

Enjoy!

Evangelizing Social Software in Argentina

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This has been an amazing week in Argentina. I got in on Tuesday morning after taking the red eye in. On Tuesday, I had several customer meetings that went very well. They asked about where other customers are seeing value in social software and potential ROI.

I also got a chance to meet a bunch of IBMers from Argentina from various places within IBM: Sales, Services, Hardware, Software, etc. They all came in to a BlueIQ session where I presented the value of social software from my perspective as an IBMer and the value they can get from social software. I even talked about how to grow their careers at IBM using social software.

For those of you who don't know, the BlueIQ program at IBM aims to create ambassadors in every area of IBM to help evangelize the value of social software. With their help, the program aims to get as many IBMers as possible using social software to collaborate and make their lives easier (using Connections, of course).

Here's the presentation that I used:

BlueIQ Argentina - Using Social Software at Work

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

Wednesday I had more customer visits and they also wanted to more about referenceable customers and ROI. I shared some of the success stories that IBM customers have shared with the world. Thursday was a lot of fun because it was the IBM Software Solutions Forum. Think of it as Lotusphere, but with all the brands mixed in. I got tasked to do the collaboration keynote. The session was titled "Smarter Collaboration: Anytime, Anywhere through portals, social, and mobile". I've also shared the presentation and you can find it here (though the demo is not included):

Smarter collaboration anywhere anytime-portals social and mobile-public

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

After the event was done, it was time to pack up and head back home. There was some bad planning on my part because Thursday was St. Patrick's Day and it turns out there was going to be a huge street party that I had to miss. In all, it was a great trip. Argentina, let me know when you need me back

How To Add Lotus Connections Search to Portal Navigation

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I recently stumbled upon a quick interesting tip in one of our internal blogs which I thought would be extremely valuable to share externally. The tip documents how to embed the Lotus Connections search into the navigation for WebSphere Portal. And by looking at the code snippet below, this could also serve as a launching pad to embed Connections search into other pages regardless of the technology behind them.

So here's our goal:

The following code snippet was added into the Portal JSPs:

<%-- Renders the search widget in the banner --%> <div class="lotusSearchContainer"> <div id="themeSearchBoxContainer" class="wptheme-searchBoxContainer"> <div id="themeSearchBox"></div> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> dojo.addOnLoad(function() { var c = {}; c.connectionsUrl = "${wp.themeConfig['resources.urls.connections_base']}"; c.proxiedConnectionsUrl = "${wp.themeConfig['resources.urls.connections_base.proxied']}"; dojo.registerModulePath("lconn.core.SearchBar", c.proxiedConnectionsUrl + "/homepage/script/lconn/core/SearchBar"); dojo.registerModulePath("lconn.core.TextBox", c.proxiedConnectionsUrl + "/homepage/script/lconn/core/TextBox") dojo.require("lconn.core.TextBox"); dojo.require("lconn.core.SearchBar"); var fileref = document.createElement("link"); fileref.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet"); fileref.setAttribute("type", "text/css"); fileref.setAttribute("href", c.proxiedConnectionsUrl + "/homepage/nav/lconn/styles/sprite-lconn.css"); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(fileref); var searchBar = new lconn.core.SearchBar( { globalOptions : [ { label : "Activities", feature : "activities" }, { label : "Blogs", feature : "blogs" }, { label : "Bookmarks", feature : "dogear" }, { label : "Communities", feature : "communities" }, { label : "Files", feature : "files" }, { label : "Forums", feature : "forums" }, { label : "Profiles", feature : "profiles" }, { label : "Wikis", feature : "wikis" } ], searchContextPath : c.connectionsUrl + "/search", lblSearch : "Search", lblSelectScope : "", lblAllConnections : "All Connections", lblAdvanced : "Advanced", _blankGif : c.proxiedConnectionsUrl + "/homepage/static/20101018.200549/nav/common/styles/images/blank.gif", onSubmit : function() { return true; } }, dojo.byId("themeSearchBox")); }); </script></div>

In this case, c.connectionsUrl and c.connectionsUrlProxied point to the absolute URL of the connections server and the same but proxied through the WPS AJAX proxy. We generate the values of these at JSP execution time from a config variable in WAS admin console, but of course you can hard-code these if you wish. In our case the URLs look something like this:

c.connectionsUrl = "http://connections.company.com"

c.connectionsUrlProxied = "/wps/proxy/http/connections.company.com"

Thanks to the guys at ISSL for doing this.

How To Add Timezone Images to Connections Profiles

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The other day I was working with a customer who had upgraded from 2.5 to 3.0. They asked me how to get the images for the timezones back up. At first, I wasn't sure what they were referring to, so I went over to BleedYellow and checked my profile there. Towards the right hand side of the screen you can see my local time and a graphic depicting my timezone as shown here:

So I got on a 2.5 server and figured out how those images were generated and then made the appropriate changes in the 3.0 server. Here's what I ended up doing (in case anyone else wants to do the same thing):

1. Download the images from here
2. Extract the images to this folder: C:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\profiles\images (note that this path may be different depending on where you are storing your Connections customizations)
3. You should now have a folder C:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\profiles\images\globes with a bunch of jpg's in it.
4. Copy the file businessCardInfo.jsp from C:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\installedApps\showcase2Cell01\Profiles.ear\lc.profiles.app.war\WEB-INF\jsps\html\scenes\profile to C:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\profiles\WEB-INF\jsps\html\scenes\profile
5. Open the file with your favorite text editor
6. Search for the text:   <div id="businessCardActions"
7. Just before that text, paste the following:
   
   

   <div class="lotusRight"> <html:img action="/timezoneImage" paramId="tzId" paramName="timezoneId" alt="${timezoneDisplayName}" title="${timezoneDisplayValue}" width="66" height="71" /> <br /> <strong><span style="white-space: nowrap;"><fmt:message key="label.profile.localtime" /></span></strong> <span id="time" style="white-space: nowrap;"><fmt:formatDate timeStyle="SHORT" type="time" timeZone="${timezoneId}" value="${nowTz}" /></span> </div>

   
   
   
8. Save the file

After, refreshing you should now see this:

Enjoy!

Lotusphere 2011 Is Done: Here's Your Homework!

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What an amazing Lotusphere 2011! As we all catch up with Lotusphere and go through our recaps, I wanted to get the year officially going and give you some homework:

1. Make sure you are subscribed to the Synch.rono.us blog -- our developers are actively looking for your feedback there. Your feedback to those posts will help us plan the next release(s) of the product. And the more we hear from you, the more the community benefits. In particular, we want your feedback on these key topics:
   
   
   1. What else should we integrate to? How should we expand on Social Everywhere?
   2. What's your list of top 5 features to add to Connections?
   
   
2. Register for the Social Business Jam which is going to take place Feb 8-11 and participate!
3. Set your TiVo to record Jeopardy! on Valentine's Day
4. Please take a few minutes to complete 3 Lotus Connections tasks on Lotusphere Online 2011 and provide us with input for future improvements to the website. To participate, please go here and remember to authenticate with your Lotusphere Online credentials.
5. Help my fellow Notes product managers. If you are a Notes customer, please take this survey to help us determine which features to include in the next release (shouldn't take more than 10 minutes)

So that's it! Five items that you need to do as homework. Your due date? This Friday!

Lotusphere 2011 Day 4: My First BOF (Part 2)

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In the previous blog entry, I shared my recap of what happened the first part of Day 4, Wednesday, of Lotusphere. I wanted to share a bit of what happened towards the end of the day. At 5:45p I had the chance to deliver my first Birds of Feather (BOF) titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I had participated in a BOF before with Stuart McIntyre, but only as a guest speaker.

This time, however, Stuart was scheduled for a BOF at the same time as me. I had to do something to draw a crowd . I figured if I could get a celebrity in the room, that would help. Therefore, I invited Rawn Shah to come in. He couldn't make it so he instead donated 3 autographed copies of his book: Social Networking for Business (which Steve Bell reviewed here). Three lucky attendees left with a copy of the book.

The purpose of the BOF was to concentrate on bad / best practices for social software adoption inside of the firewall. I wanted to generate a discussion between customers in the room to share what was and wasn't working in their organizations as they tried to become a social business. I didn't want to touch on technical stuff because, well, because there had been plenty of technical sessions throughout the conference. As I walked towards the room I ran into Sacha Chua and invited her to come along. She agreed and even volunteered to scribe the session. I've always been a big fan of her hand drawings.

Here's what we talked about in the "words" of Sacha:

I heard from the attendees that the session was valuable so hopefully we'll repeat it next year.

One thing I would like to do different next year is set up the chairs in a circle. The chairs were organized as if I was going to do a presentation and I think a circle arrangement would've allowed customers to more easily see each other.

After the BOF was done, #ls11 attendees headed out to Islands of Adventure to check out the new Harry Potter attractions.

Lotusphere 2011 Day 2: What's Coming in Social

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Lotusphere 2011, or #ls11 is you are following in Twitter, got off to its official start today with the Opening General Session, which I live blogged with Mitch Cohen. Mitch and I shared various photos throughout the event so I invite you to check that out.

The guest speaker was the Executive Producer of The Social Network, Kevin Spacey, who I thought was a great choice given the theme of the conference is Social Business. I thought Kevin Spacey did a great job on stage (and no, I'm not sucking up so I'm cast in the next movie he makes about MIT students). I also enjoyed Sandy Carter, the new VP of Sales and Evangelism at Lotus. Sandy is super energetic and talked about all the great things that IBM has done to become social. Sandy had a great takeaway as she exited the stage: "Get started on your social journey now -- it is moving so fast you can't develop a 5 year plan".

Moreover, I enjoyed that tons of customers got on stage like RIM, AT&T, CSC, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and 6 others. CSC even announced a new cloud collaboration business built on IBM technology. RIM, of course, got to show off the Playbook and it looked amazing!

The keynote was also streamed to over 1300 viewers and it's replay is here:

After the keynote, it was time to introduce what's coming in the next incarnations of Connections. Suzanne Livingston and Jim Battle took us through that. Here's what you can expect:

• A new media gallery for photo and video sharing
• Idea blogs to capture ideas and drive them through the process until implemented
• Integration with an ECM repository
• File previews
• Enhanced microblogging capabilities such as Like and Recommendations
• New share box to make it easier to share status updates, photos, videos, files, etc from a pervasive place
• More moderation capabilities
• Team calendar
• Outlook Social Connector
• and more...

After lunch, I headed over to Jeff Shick's session: Powering a Market Leading Business with Social Collaboration. Jeff got Rex Lee from RIM and Blair Klein AT&T to tell us how they are using Connections internally. Both had amazing stories and shared some very impressive statistics on adoption. Here are some highlights to that session:

A huge day as the official start of Lotusphere 2011. Will share more tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday!

Download Now: Another iPhone App for Lotus Connections !

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I'm loving this! Do you remember back in September when I talked about the first iPhone application being available for Lotus Connections? The myDeveloperWorks iPhone app has been doing very well and has achieved close to 150 downloads/week (~3000 downloads total).

A couple of weeks after that, the awesome team at MyDeveloperWorks published an article explaining step-by-step how to create an iPhone application for Lotus Connections.   As I ended that blog post I said: "I cant wait to see what kind of applications developers are now going to create". The wait is now over!

A new iPhone application is now available in the app store and you can download today. So how is this iPhone app different from the one that myDeveloperWorks created? The biggest difference is that mLinked allows you to connect to multiple instances of Lotus Connections like the one on myDeveloperWorks, BleedYellow, and Greenhouse. For those of you going to Lotusphere 2011 (#ls11), unfortunately the app won't work with LSOnline because the APIs are blocked.

Here are the features available in version 1.0 of this app:

• Support multiple instances of Lotus Connections
• View status updates
• Search Profiles
• Call & email directly from Profiles
• Accept & send invitations
• Read, browse & recommend blog entries
• Supports Lotus Connections 2.5 and 3.0

The paid version, allows you to add more Lotus Connections instances, including the one for your company. The paid version is $1.99.

Here's a couple of screenshots.

I've been playing with the app for the last 2 weeks and it's great. I highly recommend it!

You can learn more about the application by visiting the mLinked webpage. If you have feature requests or would like to have access to the forum, click here.

To download the application from iTunes, click here.

Enjoy!

Connections Administration Tool Now Available

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TIMETOACT Group, an IBM Business Partner, has just made available the Connections Administration Tool in the IBM Solutions Catalog (don't you just love that catalog??). This tool was made to simplify the lives of the Connections administrators and it provides a very easy way to do regular administrative tasks from a very nice user interface.

On Monday, I posted the list of Social Business sessions at Lotusphere 2011 (#ls11). As you may have noticed, there's a session called:

BP114

IBM Lotus Connections Administration: From the Command Line to a Graphical UI

Tuesday 4:45pm

and you can see more information about the session here: https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/lotus/lsph2011.nsf/sessionabstract?openform&sessionid=BP114 . In that session, the Connections Administration Tool will be presented. So if you are a Connections administrator, you certainly don't want to miss out on that one.
Here's a screenshot of how the new administration UI looks like.

I'm very excited by all the work our Business Partners are doing. Can't wait to see what else they come up with!

Lotus Connections 3.0 Performance Tuning Guide Now Available

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The Lotus Connections 3.0 Performance Tuning Guide is now available from the Lotus Connections Wiki. This document provides recommendations for performance tuning of IBM® Lotus® Connections 3.30 based on the experience of the IBM Collaboration Solutions Performance team. However, the optimal tuning and the resulting system capacity can be affected by many factors, including the characteristics of the load on the system and the hardware used, including servers, disk subsystems, network topology, and more. Therefore the recommendations in this document should not be considered the optimal values for every situation, but rather a recommended starting point for tuning a Connections deployment.

If you are a business partner, or someone responsible for deploying Lotus Connections, you need to read this:

To download the full version, click here.

Social Software at Lotusphere 2011

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I posted this already in the Synch.rono.us blog but wanted to post it here for visibility. Also, while at Lotusphere (#ls11) , if you ever want to pull up a list of all the Social Software sessions at Lotusphere 2011, just go to: http://bit.ly/SocialLS11

---

Are you psyched about Lotusphere 2011 ? You should be! We have a bit over 2 weeks left and I'm sure all of you are already planning your schedules for Lotusphere. We thought it would be a good idea to capture all the social related sessions at Lotusphere 2011 in one place. This way, we'll help you start thinking about which sessions to go to.   

Also, in case you missed it, Genii Software has created a Notes database with all the sessions in it. It's really nice because you can create your schedule directly from that database. Additionally, you can Tweet the session details or even check into it using Foursquare. If you need mobile access to the list of sessions, The Turtle Partnership has created a free Blackberry app. They also created free iPhone app. An iPad app is awaiting approval from Apple and will be available soon.

Note that this list does not include the sessions that will be presented at the Social Business Industry Symposium (sponsored by Wired Magazine).

Session ID	Session Name	Date/Time
JMP203	IBM Lotus Quickr for IBM Lotus Domino in Action	Sunday, 1:30pm
JMP205	IBM Lotus Connections 3.0 Administration Overview	Sunday, 1:30pm
INV101	Powering a Market Leading Business with Social Collaboration	Monday, 1pm
INV111	Making Decisions Collaboratively with Cognos Business Intelligence & IBM Lotus Connections	Tuesday, 10am
INV112	The Social Side of IBM's New Advanced Case Management Offerings	Wednesday, 10am
INV117	Social Media in 2011: 10-Minute Warning	Tuesday, 10am
INV201	A “Day in the Life” Exceptional Work Experience	Tuesday, 4:45pm
INV202	Building the Vision of an Exceptional Collaborative Work Experience	Wednesday, 4:45pm
INV203	Content-Centric vs People-Centric: The Copernican Revolution of Today's Business	Wednesday, 11:15am
INV206	Collaborative Decision Making	Thursday, 11:15am
ID301	What's New in IBM Lotus Connections 3.0	Monday, repeats on Tuesday, 11am
ID302	Best Practices for a Happy and Healthy IBM Lotus Connections Deployment!	Tuesday, 1:30
ID303	Exceptional Work Experience - Integrating and Extending Connections, Portal, Quickr, Notes, Sametime & ECM	Monday, 11am
ID304	Lotus Connections User Management and SSO: What you NEED to know!	Tuesday, 3:30pm
ID305	Build Large-scale Performing Enterprise Solutions for IBM Lotus Connections	Tuesday, 4:45pm
ID306	Compliance and Moderation with Lotus Connections 3.0	Wednesday, 4:15pm
ID307	What's New in IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5	Monday, 3:45pm
ID308	Architecture Deep Dive, Upgrade Deployment & Performance Best Practices for IBM Lotus Quickr for Domino 8.5	Monday 5:00pm
ID309	Extending Social Collaboration with Enterprise Content	Wednesday, 3:00pm
ID701	IBM Lotus Advancements in a Mobile World	Wednesday, 11:15am
AD301	Extending the Social Network – Part 1	Tuesday 4:45pm
AD302	Extending the Social Network – Part 2	Wednesday 8:30am
AD303	Connecting Developers and Community with Rational Jazz and Lotus Connections	Tuesday, 1:30pm
AD304	Customizing Lotus Connections 3.0	Tuesday 10am
AD305	Deep Dive on UI and Server-side Customizations for IBM Lotus Quickr for Domino 8.5	Wednesday, 4:15pm
AD402	Developing Exceptional Web and Mobile Experiences with Social Capabilities	Tuesday 11:15am
AD403	Repeatable Patterns with Industry Templates for Customer Experience Suite	Monday 1:00pm
AD501	IBM Project Vulcan: The IBM Collaboration Toolkit	Tuesday 4:45pm
AD504	Best Practices for Mobile User Experience Design	Wednesday 10:00am
BP104	LDAP: The Amazing Infrastructure Challenge	Monday 11:00am
BP105	Twelve MORE Things Your Mother Never Told You About Deploying IBM Lotus Connections 3.0	Monday 3:45pm
BP109	IBM Lotus Domino Admin to IBM WebSphere Application Admin - in 1 hour!	Wednesday 8:30am
BP114	IBM Lotus Connections Administration: From the Command Line to a Graphical UI	Tuesday 4:45pm
BP205	Quickr 8.5 for Domino Development: Forget Everything We've Ever Told You	Monday 5:00pm
BP206	Working with Feeds in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino	Tuesday 10:00am
BP303	Social Comes To You: How To Bring Connections to your Application in Context	Wednesday 11:15am
CUST102	From the Flintstones to the Jetsons: The Avery Dennison InfoXchange Story	Tuesday 11:15am
CUST104	BASF Implements connect.BASF: A Global Online Business Network	Tuesday 3:30pm
CUST106	How 3M got Social	Wednesday 11:15am
CUST107	Coles Supermarket: Social Computing in a Retail Setting	Wednesday 1:30pm
SHOW202	Enterprise 2.0 Hero: A Beginner's Guide to Installing IBM Lotus Connections 3.0	Tuesday 4:30pm
SHOW203	Lotus Connections 3.0 – Enterprise Integration for Administrators	Sunday, 4pm

There you have it. 42 social sessions during a three-and-half day span. So put on your Social Business hat and join us at Lotusphere 2011. See you there!

How To Get the LinkedIn Widget working in Connections 3.0

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On Wednesday I was working on a demo environment and wanted to install the LinkedIn widget in this new Connections 3.0 instance. You may remember that I introduced the LinkedIn widget for Lotus Connections in April of last year.

Once you download the widget from the catalog, you can install it on your 3.0 server. The widget includes step-by-step instructions and they mostly work except for the last step where you configure the translations for the widget.

In 3.0, the process to add custom strings for widgets changed a bit, thus the instructions attached to the widget are no longer applicable. Therefore, ignore steps (2f) and (2g) in those instructions. Instead, you can follow these instructions to make sure the translations are properly loaded. (Note: Even if your users are all using the same language, you must follow these steps).

1. Copy linkedIn.zip to C:\IBM\LotusConnections\Data\shared\customization\strings
2. Extract the contents of the file
3. You'll see a folder structure created.
4. Go to: C:\IBM\LotusConnections\Data\shared\customization\strings\com\ibm\lconn\linkedin\resources
5. Copy all the files from this directory to C:\IBM\LotusConnections\Data\shared\customization\strings
6. Append the following string to the beginning of each file name: com.ibm.lconn.linkedin.resources.
7. Check out LotusConnections-Config.xml
8. In the <resources> section add this line: <widgetBundle prefix="LinkedInFramework" name="com.ibm.lconn.linkedin.resources.linkedin" />
9. Save the file and check it in
10. Restart all the nodes and application servers

UPDATE (13/Jan/2011): You have to do one more change. Open <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\cellName\lc_linkedInApp.ear\LinkedInFramework.war\returnLocation.jsp with your favorite text editor. In there you will see an include to Profile's Dojo v1.2.3. That needs to be changed to Dojo v1.4 since that's what Connections v3.0 uses. Therefore, the include link should now look like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/profiles/dojo_1.4/dojo/dojo.js"></script>

I've alerted the right person so that the instructions are updated on the widget.

Enjoy!

Social Business ROI - Why Do You Need This With Examples Like This?

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I can't think of a better way to start the year 2011 than with an amazing success story that led to increased customer satisfaction thanks to social collaboration. My colleague Fred Raguillat wrote this up, so I'll let you read through his awesome story:

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This is another scenario where IBM's Social Collaboration Platform & Atlas made finding experts & collaboration across continents an easy task..!

Adam Ramsay and Rob Thatcher from IBM UK needed Dev Technical assistance fixing a deployment problem with Mobile for their customer. Using IBM social software, we were able to successfully resolve the problem within 24 hours across two different continents.

Here's the sequence of events...

16:45, Monday December 6th GMT, Adam Sametimed with me, asking for help with his problem.  Michael Roche (Lotus Connections Distinguished Engineer) had referred Adam to me for assistance on "mobile application issues with applications".

By 17:12 I had all the information I needed from Adam and Sametimed Luis Benitez for help identifying developer(s) in in the U.S. that could assist. Luis performed a quick tag search using Lotus Connections ('mobile', 'development', 'connections'), identifying the best two qualified developers. With three clicks he narrowed down a company of 400,000 employees to 2 employees!

I then used Atlas to find my "contact entry point" (my link to those guys). I then mailed a "help request" to all the relevant parties..

At 18:30 Jesse Hill, one of the mobile LC developers, confirmed that he would be happy to help..

At 8:00 the next morning the UK team sent the log files over to Jesse in the U.S. By that afternoon Jesse sent a fix on to Rob. Rob made the relevant changes, and by 17:00 Rob sent an email to confirm that all issues were resolved.

Sounds easy, yes!? but think if we did not have those tools in our reach, this would have taken for ever..!

Thanks to IBM Social Software, we’ve got another happy customer! ;-)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

From: Robert Thatcher/UK/IBM@IBMGB
To: Adam Ramsay/UK/IBM@IBMGB
Cc: Tony Hickman/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Jesse Hill/Phoenix/IBM@IBMUS, Fred Raguillat/Ireland/IBM@IBMIE
Date: 07/12/2010 17:13
Subject: Re: Fw: Help Request! RBS Lotus Connections mobile assistance


Adam,

Headline is good news Mobile is fixed and working.

Longer story is that Jesse found the problem very quickly, and it is fixed in 2.5.0.2. But rather than disturb the system Jesse gave me a work around to the Configuration file. I have made the change to the config file, and restarted the Mobile app only. I would suggest a complete restart of WAS when convenient to confirm that the config changes did not upset other functions.

THANKS Jesse.

Rob

---

How's that for a success story? And it would've been less than 24 hours if it wasn't for the timezone difference.

Sogeti Becomes a Social Business with IBM Social Software

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Sogeti exemplifies one of the superb success stories of becoming a Social Business. You may remember that I talked about Sogeti last year as they went into production picking IBM Social Software over Microsoft SharePoint as their Enterprise 2.0 platform. Sogeti became a fully networked enterprise (to borrow the keyword from McKinsey) and achieved real business value from it.

For those who don't know, Sogeti is a wholly owned subsidiary of Capgemini. They employ 20,000 people in 15 countries and over 400 locations. Therefore, collaboration is mission critical for Sogeti.

Erik van Ommeren, Director of Innovation at Sogeti, talks about their choice of social business platform and why they chose IBM's social software platform in the following video. I found it interesting that when Eric was pitching this to senior management he chose to show them a sample of the microblogging activity that was occurring in the system. Senior management loved the transparency it created and how easy it was for them to get a pulse as to what was going on throughout the organization.

Sogeti got so much value from using Lotus Connections internally that they have now built a business around IBM's social business platform to help their customers, in turn, become a Social Business.

To learn more about Sogeti's social collaboration platform, what they call TeamPark, click here.

Need Your Feedback: How Easy is Lotus Connections 3.0 ?

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Happy Friday! Remember how back in October I asked for your feedback on what to look for in Lotus Connections Next? Well, now the Lotus User Experience Research team is looking to evaluate the ease of use of Lotus Connections 3.0 on Lotus Greenhouse, and would like your feedback! Please take a few minutes to complete three Lotus Connections tasks on the following website and provide us with input for future improvements to the product. To participate, please visit the following URL, and follow the instructions on the screen.

https://s.userzoom.com/m/MSBDOVM0MzM_

Note: Please remember to use your Lotus Greenhouse account to log into Lotus Connections. If you don't have it, you can easily join Lotus Greenhouse here https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/login.jsp

Feel free to forward this invitation to any other people who may be interested in participating. We will close the study by December 31th. If you have any questions/comments about the study, feel free to send an email to yangmeng@us.ibm.com. Also, if you would like to sign up as a volunteer for future IBM user experience studies, you can do so here.

Thanks in advance for your help!

My Experience Installing Lotus Connections 3.0 for the First Time

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Yup. Believe it or not, yesterday was the first time I installed Lotus Connections 3.0. While I had the beta 1 and beta 2 code I never had the time to sit down and install it in my own image. In between my job role change, the new baby, planning two product launches and Lotusphere, it's been a crazy second half.

Things seem to be settling down and I'm getting used to my new workload. I did the install as I'm helping prepare a new super awesome demo environment with Quickr, Cognos, Sharepoint, Sametime, and Connections all integrated together ( I will soon release more details on it once it's ready).

I was pleasantly surprised with all the improvements that have been done in the installer of this new version. The install took about 6 hours to get everything up and running. A couple of notes:

• I did this on a VMWare so in real hardware this time would definitely be less.
• I also did this sequentially. If you did it all in parallel it would be ~3 hours.
• Most of the time was spent just watching progress bars since the installation has been streamlined where I just click Next, Next, Next, Next, and so on.

Here's what I installed (and how long each step took me):

• WebSphere 7 + fixpacks (~1.25 hrs)
• TDI v7 + fixpacks (~30 mins)
• DB 9.7 (~30 mins)
• IBM HTTP Server v7 + fixpacks (~15 mins)
• Lotus Connections v3.0 (~1.5 hrs)
• Post-installation steps (~1.5 hrs)

To help me along, I followed the step-by-step instructions with screenshots provided in the wiki here. Those instructions were definitely key in helping me move along so fast. One of the things that I always like in documentation is screenshots and that document definitely fits the bill. I'm assuming that anyone who's doing a Show-N-Tell session at Lotusphere 2011 on how to install Connections will be able to just rip off the screenshots from there!

Anyway, congrats to the development team and the documentation for all the improvements that have been made in this area.

Software Development is Best when It's Social!

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Last year, IBM announced integration of Lotus Connections with Rational's software development suite, and you can see it at work here:

Making the software development process social is just something that every organization must do and of course follows our social everywhere strategy. Imagine empowering all your software developers and getting them access to your customers, business partners, marketing, research, etc all from the context of their work. That's a sure step towards becoming an agile organization!

Recently, I was reading John Waters' blog and he emphasized how much he likes this integration. On Thursday @ 11am ET (8am PT), IBM will be hosting a free webcast targeted for organizations involved in software development:

To meet tough deadlines and improve quality, software developers obviously need to collaborate with each other. However, they also need to leverage the expertise from a wider community of users, partners and other stakeholders during development.

By combining social software into the Rational Team Concert environment, developers gain instant access to the experts they need, get issues resolved faster and receive feedback from communities to help ensure that projects meet their intended goals. Attend this webcast to see how new capabilities expedite the development process.

You can sign up and register here.

3M Goes Social and Viral

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As I was catching up on the news over the weekend, I came onto this one that I thought was very cool!

Inspired by the Shorewood Lib Dub video (with over 1.4 million views), back in October 3M employees (3Mers) from all over the world published a video they created on their own time. The video spread virally internally and it was posted to YouTube yesterday.

What's really cool about this is that 3M, well, let me quote them:

We relied on internal social media tools, specifically Lotus Connections and an internally-developed video sharing tool called 3M DIY Video Library. Connections’ Communities allowed for private discussion and debate. Connections’ Wiki managed group documents for project plans, team pages, storyboards and music strategy. There was a private community blog for announcements, status updates and weekly newsletters. Teams uploaded drafts of their video segments for comment (and praise) from the other teams to the video library.

Most of the employees in the video had never created a video and had never used Connections in the past. They all did this on their spare time, sometimes over holidays or vacation. Here's the video that has delighted 3M employees and executives:

I also liked how they recruited volunteers, they sent an anonymous invitation with as little information as possible: "Will you join us?". 75 employees from US, Poland, Russia, Italy, Dubai, Singapore and other countries accepted. Most employees didn't know each other, have never met, and probably never will. Isn't that awesome!!??!! (Note: I was also happy that Puerto Rico was represented in the video :) )

Congratulations to the 3M team!

To read more about this project and see the whole story behind this, see this post.

Social Software and Internal Communications - A Perfect Match!

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It recently came to my attention an article that was posted on how IBM Internal communications at shifting from creation to curation. The article describes how IBM employees have adopted social software inside the firewall (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, file-sharing, etc) and overwhelm the content created by the professional communicators.

As you may know, IBM has taken a de-centralized approach for participation in external social media. That's why you don't see a single @IBM account over at Twitter, instead there are thousands of employees tweeting on IBM's behalf and driving the conversations. As mentioned in the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, this model is not about mass communications, but rather masses of communicators. And this model works according to this article from the Social Media Examiner.

This de-centralized model is also used inside the firewall. IBM's internal communications staff leverages the content produced in IBM's internal social software platform (which happens to be Lotus Connections). And this has brought the company closer together -- more connected. Metrics show that general articles intended for companywide consumption get little traffic because they lack relevance. And who knows what's relevant? The employees, of course. That's one reason traffic is up on IBM's intranet thanks to all the employee-created content.

Here's a video that shows IBM's Vice President of Digital Strategy and Development, Ben Edwards, on this topic. I did find it interesting that they showcase the majority of intranets as putting people last... the anti-social intranet, if you will:

Hear more from Ben Edwards on IBM's intranet and the role of content curation.

So if you manage your company's intranet, have you thought of socializing it to drive more traffic to it? As I work with various customers in all types of industries, I hear often that they've spent a lot of money in building an intranet, but are having tons of challenges getting employees to visit the intranet. CEMEX, for example, had that problem and they recently decided to socialize their intranet and provoke a shift in their employee culture.

When I talk to customers I also hear that the concept of socializing the intranet, however, often brings a fear to the internal communicators of losing control... or even losing importance. As a person who manages the intranet, you may fear your job becomes less important, less significant. I like and agree how Ben Edwards think it's the contrary. Your job shifts into becoming the adviser to others, the go-to SME (subject matter expert). You also become a sort of museum curator where you pick the best of the best. And this is huge, because employees could be overwhelmed with all the content that's being created. The internal communications professional can curate the content and pick the content that would be most relevant to others, thereby significantly adding value to the intranet.

Do you agree?