LotusLive Connections Upgraded This Weekend

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Over this past weekend, we finalized some upgrades to LotusLive Connections, our multi-tenant IBM Connections solution in the cloud. This update adds some great new capabilities to Communities, Files, Activities, and Profiles. Here's a couple of my new favorite features:

• Community business owner can give ownership to another person
• Community file folders for communities that you belong to are now shown under 'Folders shared with Me'
• Easily link to Files from Activities
• Parity with IBM Connections Files (which means, for example, new drag-n-drop capabilities!)
• Instant messaging presence information in the business card
• Limit scope of a community to an organization only
• ProjExec has been integrated into LotusLive. ProjExec Live enables project managers to create, plan, execute and track projects using a professional Gantt editor that synchronizes with Microsoft Project. Invite other LotusLive users as project members and collaborate securely using a multi-project activity stream called the Project Wall. ProjExec Live is an intuitive, mobile-friendly solution to effectively manage and deliver projects of any size. More information is available in the wiki page for ProjExec. If you haven't seen ProjExec yet, here's a demo.

I'm so excited to have this release out. The team has worked tremendously to get this out, so congratulations to everyone!! For more information on What's New in this release, go here.

How Social Business Tools Can Help In Disaster Situations

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Remember how last week I mentioned that IBM is actively looking at documenting success stories of organizations that are embracing social software ? Well, here's another one that I wanted to highlight. This is a great story of how social business tools can help in disaster situations such as the earthquake that occurred last year in Haiti. I think it's also a great example of how non-profit organizations can leverage social business platforms.

Colleagues in Care turned to IBM's social business in the cloud capabilities to build a social network of doctors, where each doctor could highlight their skills. That way doctors could be matched to the needs of a particular situation, thereby getting the most value out of the available resources.

This is where LotusLive comes into play. Take a peek at this 4 minute video and let me know what you think.

Great story, right? Go ahead and share it!

Social Business ROI ? Here's Yet Another Example!

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As you know, I'm one of the product managers for IBM Connections and one of my responsibilities is for our solution running in the cloud. I truly believe that one of the best ways to help organizations understand the value of becoming a Social Business is to learn from the successes of others. And at IBM we are actively documenting and highlighting the success stories of our customers.

One recent example is Newly Weds Foods, a Chicago based, global leader in food technology, needed an effective collaboration tool to bring its geographically dispersed team together, without the capital expense and staff needed to run an in-house solution.

With 27 plants all over the world, including the Philippines, China and Thailand, moving to the cloud made perfect sense. Newly Weds Foods chose IBM's LotusLive social collaboration cloud services to enable its culinary team to share information and ideas quickly and easily regardless of the time or location.

Culinary chefs use Profiles from IBM Connections to find and connect with other chefs around the world. They use Files and Communities within IBM Connections to share information from recipes to demos. They use Web meetings to share presentations and ideas with colleagues and clients, who range from retail stores, to mom and pop eateries to large national chain account restaurants.

The result? They are now saving 4-5 days per month in travel time, approximately 10% on airfare and travel expenses and they have sped communication response rate from days to hours. Working in different time zones is no longer a barrier to productivity and LotusLive's unique "guest account" model provides no cost access to clients so they can collaborate more easily on recipe ideas.

I truly believe that one of our differentiators is the "guest account" model and it's definitely something that our customers love. Who doesn't love free access ?

Check out this video with more information:



What are you waiting for ! Are you on your road to become a social business ?

Looking Back, Looking Forward

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Last year, it was officially signed on IBM paper that I would be moving to the IBM Social Software product management team (even though the move was actually back in September 2010). Thus, I figured I would share a bit about the last year and what I'm looking forward to see in the next year.

The past year has been a tremendously fun one. Travel has been significantly reduced (so I can spend more time with the family) and I've learned a lot about how the IBM business runs. When I joined the team, I took the reins for IBM Lotus Quickr Domino and today I also co-manage LotusLive Connections and IBM Connections (Files and Wikis).

During the past year I've had a lot of opportunities, such as:

• Working on the abstract selection process for Lotusphere 2011 (and presented there for the first time ever!!)
• Briefed various analysts such as Forrester where we were recently named Leader in their Forrester Wave. Also worked with Stowe Boyd to update the write up for IBM Connections
  
• Started planning for the next releases of Quickr Domino (more about this below) and worked to improve the documentation to make it easier to find information.
• Participated in the selection process for the new IBM Champions
• Worked towards closure of the LotusLive Connections winter release and have started planning next year's release
• Worked towards closure of the IBM Connections 4.0 plan and have started thinking about the next release
• Actively monitoring the IBM Connections Users community in Greenhouse, specially it's Idea list ;)
• Published various videos to YouTube (e.g. IBM Connections with embed.ly and creating custom icons for Connections)
• Participated in various conferences like Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and IMPACT in Las Vegas (and co-submitted an abstract with Suzanne Livingston for SXSW 2012. Hope we get selected!)
• Started working on content for Lotusphere 2012.
• Started blogging on Technorati to take the IBM message to a larger audience
• Started the Social Media Club in Puerto Rico (ok, not officially related to IBM, but a way to keep spreading the social business message)

This week I'm presenting the latest roadmap for Quickr Domino and I'll talk about the next two releases of the product. The roadmap will be presented to our internal sales folks as well as to our business partners at the same time. Once this happens, I'm expecting they'll start helping me spread the word with all of our current and prospective customers. Additionally, I'll be flying to New York to talk about some of the new announcements that will come out this week (more on that later this week)

Next week, I'll be participating at the IBM Leadership Alliance conference (something I didn't get a chance to participate on last year since I joined the team at about the same time). Looking forward to talk to some of our key customers and get even more content ready for Lotusphere 2012.

Skype, Tungle, & Mac application sharing comes to the IBM Cloud Web Meetings

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Today, IBM announced a long list of updates to its collaboration cloud offering. I tried to count all the new features, but there are simply too much to count them manually. A rough estimate comes to about 150 new features!

One of the things that's very attractive of the new updates is its seamless integration between mail and other collaborative services, whereas other vendors force you to go from module to module.

Additionally, I'm really excited about the integration with Tungle. If you haven't signed up to Tungle, you should do it today. It simplifies the process of scheduling meetings with people outside of your company (which probably means that you don't have access to their calendar availability). Tungle fixes this and it's now directly integrated within LotusLive so you can easily schedule meetings with your LotusLive contacts.

Moreover, the Communities component of Lotus Connections is now part of LotusLive which has been a popular customer request. Other changes within Lotus Connections include the ability to tag people and add custom profile fields.

Lastly, but not least, Mac users rejoice: application sharing is now available for Mac users. This is in addition to the nifty free web meeting application for iPhone/iPad.

Here's a video that walks you through the new features:

To view the video in full screen, go here. Don't have a LotusLive account? Start a free trial today.

Enjoy!

Enterprise 2.0: We Need More Execs Like Bob Picciano

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One of the things that I really regret is not attending the Blogger Q&A that was put together for Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees. I had a customer meeting during the conference that I just couldn't get out of. And I wasn't sure of how much I had missed until I read the latest highlight from the conference written up by "the other Luis", Luis Suarez.

In the blog entry, Luis tells us how Bob Picciano, General Manager of IBM Lotus, uses the different social software tools to more effectively collaborate with his peers and customers. For example, Bob uses LotusLive to reach out to customers and business partners, and internally use Lotus Connections to, as Luis says, "change the center of gravity so that it speeds up the process of reaching out to executives".

I've been following Bob's microblogging activity internally and love it. I specially like it when I microblog internally and he actually responds to my messages!. And if you are following me on Twitter, you would probably remember this tweet:

That tweet was specifically referring to a funny comment Bob Picciano had done internally. Luis concludes his summary with:

Yes, indeed, we need more Bob Piccianos in the corporate world! And the sooner, the better! For all of us.

And I couldn't agree more. To read the entire blog entry from Luis Suarez, go here.