The IBM Connections Cloud January 2016 is Now Available

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Just in time for IBM Connect 2016, there are now more capabilities that have been added to IBM Connections Cloud.

Here's a snapshot of what's new this month:

Real-time alerts help you focus on items that need your attention
Stay up to date with things that require your attention and response. The new notification center in the navigation bar increases your awareness less disruptively. See alerts with a single click - no matter where you are in the service. Allows you stay on track or swiftly shift gears depending on what is required at the moment. Note: This is slowly rolling out to all customers. If you don't see it, you'll have it by end of the month.

Leverage 3rd party apps to maximize value of Communities

Community owners can add third-party apps to Communities. A new extension point opens up the possibilities for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to create apps for Communities. Developers can now write custom responsive apps that can be surfaced within Communities. Community owners don't have to do anything different from what they do today. As soon as a new third party app has been approved by the administrator, it'll be available for all community owners of that organization. AppFusions has already taken advantage of this integration and has created a Community app for OneDrive. Check out the demo below: 

Organize your files how you want to

Now you can create nested folders to organize your content in a familiar hierarchy. You can create sub-folders within folders to give your content a structure that makes it easier for you and other users to manage content. For both My Files and Community Files , you can build a hierarchy of folders with tree-navigation on the side of the Connections Files page.



Nested folders are also supported in the Connections Mobile app and in the IBM Connections Desktop Plugins for Microsoft Windows and the IBM Connections Plugin for Microsoft Outlook when syncing your offline files with Connections Files in the cloud.

Drag and drop support added on Microsoft Windows

Also new in January is the ability to drag and drop files from the Windows desktop directly to an IBM Connections folder in the IBM Connections Desktop Plugins for Microsoft Windows .

Improved user experience working with files

The sidebar is now resizable and labels have replaced the icons on the tabs making it easier to navigate and view information and comments.

To see what else is new, check out this page. Hope to see you next week at IBM Connect 2016!

Announcing IBM Connections 5.5 & IBM Docs 2.0

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I'm happy to announce the upcoming availability of IBM Connections 5.5 and IBM Docs 2.0, our next major on-premises release.  As we've done with previous releases, plus,given we have a single code base for cloud and on-prem, we've taken a snapshot of our cloud, made a few adjustments here and there, and we are making that available to our on premises customers.

There's over 100 new features and there's just no way that I can cover all of this in this post.  However, if you look at all the cool things that we've delivered to our cloud offering since our last major on-prem release (ie. IBM Connections 5.0) then you'll know everything that's part of IBM Connections 5.5.

So when can you get it ? As per the announcement letter that was published minutes ago, the software will be available for download this Friday. 

Now, let me get things going and cover some of the highlights for these releases:

IBM Docs 2.0

• Inline comments are preserved while files are being edited offline (e.g. while on a plane working on a file without connectivity, you can see and reply to comments and your changes will be sync'ed back automatically when you are back in the network)
• New file viewer with high quality previews and the ability to interact with content in view mode (e.g. show/hide columns)
• Auto-publish your file updates and make them available to readers instantly or save file as draft and work with other editors before making the changes available to readers
• Support up to 20 simultaneous editors at the same time
• New API so that you can bring the power of our real-time collaborative editing capabilities to 3rd party file repositories.
• ... and more!

IBM Connections 5.5

• Organize your documents, presentations and more into your own nested folder hierarchy in Personal and Community Files
• Brand new file viewer experience which allows you to find the content that you need faster and review it quickly without having to download
• Build powerful team sites specific for your team needs (e.g. HR, Sales, Marketing, etc) with new configuration capabilities such as:
• New community layouts
• Responsive apps so you can just drag-n-drop between columns in one motion
• Rename apps based on your audience
• A brand new Rich Content app which you can use for announcements or embedding content from the web 
• and much more.. !
• Smart type-ahead search to find what you need instantly
• Enhancements to the rich text editor such as permanent pen, sort table data, and more
• Real-time alerts on your desktop (for HTML5 browsers) to notify you when content needs your attention
• ... and more!

We have a demo and a new Reviewer's Guide coming up so stay tuned for details. Want to learn more? Check out the webcast tomorrow where the product managers will take you through what is new in these releases. Want even more ? Then join us for the Ask the Product Managers session for Thursday and we'll take your questions.

So if you are using IBM Connections on-premises, get ready for an upgrade and let me know when you've upgraded!

Introducing File Sync for Mobile and More in IBM Connections 4.5 CR4

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A couple of hours ago, IBM Connections 4.5 CR4 was made available.  This new cumulative release introduces various new features, two of which specifically for mobile that I would like to focus on.

It's worth noting that these features are already available to our cloud customers so we are just wrapping these up and giving them to our on prem customers.

First, push notifications alert you when you have a new to-do (as seen below in the image), when someone asks to join one of your communities, or someone invites you to join their network.

Additionally, you can now select individual files to sync and work while you are offline. When syncing, the server will do a differential sync. That way if one of your co-workers updates only 1 slide in a 50MB presentation, only the particular slide that was changed will be sync, saving you time, battery, and bandwidth. If you don't have unlimited 3G/4G/LTE plan, you can also choose to sync only while connected to wifi.

Finally, you can also pick and choose which files to sync to which device. For example, you may only want 2-3 key presentations on your Android phone (or iPhone) while having 20-30 documents on your iPad where you can more easily edit the files.

Check out this 4 minute demo so you can see File Sync working in Mobile:


To see what else is new in IBM Connections 4.5 CR4, go here. To configure File Sync and push notifications, see the documentation here.

Demo: Monitoring Lotus Quickr Domino

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A while ago I got together with Steve Bystran from GSX who was here in Puerto Rico for vacation. Luckily, he was staying at a hotel that was very close to me and he offered to take an hour away from his vacation to meet with me. I had heard of GSX's monitoring solution for Quickr Domino at Lotusphere #ls12 but I hadn't seen it in person.

So we got together and I got to see a quick demo of how GSX Monitor integrates with Lotus Quickr Domino to monitor various metrics.

Today, you can use GSX Monitor to:

• Monitor Quickr server and service availability
• Track and monitor the availability of key places
• Monitor authentication, places and catalog availability
• Monitor the performance of individual places and send an alert if a particular place does not respond in a specific amount of time
• Use Quickr statistics for reporting

If you haven't seen GSX Monitor with Quickr in action, here's the demo:

Enjoy!

How To Add a "Follow Community" button in an Email

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I saw this posted internally and just felt compelled to share. My colleague, Romain Lienard, He developed a way to quickly add a button to an email so that recipients can quickly follow an IBM Connections Community with a single click. I can see this being very very handy, specially when combined with the community email newsletter generator. This is a great example of using LotusScript and the IBM Connections API.

What follows is a copy of Romain's blog entry:

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The IBM Connections API can be used with Lotus Notes and its LotusScript programming language in order to facilitate some tasks for end users.

So with some Notes support from Herbert Hilhorst, I wrote a piece of LotusScript that automatically follows a community with a simple click. The authentication is done directly in the Notes client

  

All you have to do is :

1 - create a button in your mail, via Create>Hotspot>Button.

2 - Specify a label for your button, select LotusScript instead of Formula

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

3 - Copy & paste this code, after changing the CommunityUID (here it's 5bf86449-cd87-4e02-bef5-a24f24408723) according to your needs :

Sub Click(Source As Button)
     
     Dim objHttp
     
     Set objHttp = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
     url = |https://w3-connections.ibm.com/communities/follow/atom/resources?source=communities|
     req = |<entry>
<id>urn:lsid:ibm.com:follow:resource-5bf86449-cd87-4e02-bef5-a24f24408723</id>
<category term="resource-follow" scheme="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/type"></category>
<category term="communities" scheme="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/source"></category>
<category term="community" scheme="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/resource-type"></category>
<category term="5bf86449-cd87-4e02-bef5-a24f24408723" scheme="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/resource-id"></category>
</entry>|
     objHttp.open "POST", url, False, "", ""
     objHttp.setRequestHeader "Content-type", "text/xml"
     objHttp.send(req)
     Msgbox "You're now following the TEC-F community. Thank you !"
     
End Sub

  

Save your document, click on the button, and voila ! Here's the original blog entry so you can give thanks to Romain :).