Let's talk Integrations with IBM Watson Workspace

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Yesterday, IBM unveiled a new category called IBM Watson Work and two offerings available to all IBM World of Watson conference attendees: IBM Watson Work Services and IBM Watson Workspace.

If you've been following me for a while, you know I'm a big fan of integrations, app dev, and platforms. Well, today I'm happy to share the news that IBM Watson Workspace works with IFTTT. In fact, it's the first IBM app to be part of the IFTTT ecosystem. If you are not familiar with IFTTT (that is IF This Then That), they make it super easy to connect the apps that you love together and configure what they call recipes. In other words, when something happens in one app, then do something in another app. IFTTT currently has 370+ apps in the catalog, so chances are that you can integrate with what you want (e.g. Box, Gmail, your car, you smart home devices and more!)

To start creating your own integration with IFTTT, head out to: ifttt.com/workspace . Fist bump to the IFTTT team for helping share the news:

Just in time for #ibmwow! Please welcome the @IBMWatson Workspace Channel to IFTTT 🚀 https://t.co/MsNhhXnHeM pic.twitter.com/QfrKRdTuu9

— IFTTT (@IFTTT) October 25, 2016

If you missed the keynote yesterday or you want to review the announcements, you can catch the replay here:


And here's a recap of the key tweets!

IBM Announces a New Category: IBM Watson Work

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In today's press release, IBM announced a new category called IBM Watson Work. In that category there are two new offerings that will be available: IBM Watson Work Services and IBM Watson Workspace. IBM Watson Workspace uses cognitive analytics to help users communicate with their teams and focus on key business outcomes. Teams now have a single space to manage all their work conversations and avoid information overload with smart summaries that highlight the most relevant actions and decisions so team members stay aligned and prioritize daily tasks quicker. This is what you may heard before as Project Toscana.

IBM Watson Workspace is built on a platform that we call IBM Watson Work Services. Watson Work Services provides a set of APIs built to help developers build apps that understand conversations and interpret user needs and intent using natural methods of communication. Developers can use these to infuse Watson Work capabilities into existing work applications and products or accelerate differentiation when building new apps.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Businesses today need to apply cognitive-powered productivity applications and services to digital content, conversations, and workflows to empower their employees with the ability to find, connect and work with the right experts; speed access to relevant content and insights; and provide the time and space to work simply and together.

• IBM Watson Workspace learns how an individual works and interacts, and consolidates multiple work conversations from various communications channels into a single space. Using Watson, the technology is able highlight the most urgent action items, point to the right content needed at the time, and automate everyday tasks so employees can focus on key business outcomes. 

• IBM Watson Work Services are a set of cognitive APIs –Action Identification, Moment Identification, and Summarization – given to developers through the offering’s website so they can infuse cognitive capabilities into existing work products and applications such as IBM Watson Workspace, third party applications, and when building new applications. The technology uses natural language classifiers that are pre-trained to identify key ‘actions, questions, decisions, and commitments in a conversation. It can analyze and disambiguate context to facilitate fulfillment of the next action. For example, if someone says: "Great point –let's schedule a meeting to discuss further," the system can identify 'schedule a meeting' as an action, and help the person find the best time to continue the conversation.

One of the cognitive capabilities available today in the preview is called "Moments". You know how painful it is to catch up when you've been away from work on vacation, out for a meeting or just lunch. You come back to a mess of information, and the time you spend catching up, is time that you are falling behind. No more! With Moments, Watson gives you summaries of conversations (think of it like Cliff Notes!) and at a glance you can see what was talked about, who was engaged, the content that was shared, etc. In seconds, you are caught up and aligned with your team.

Today, Inhi Cho, GM for IBM Collaboration Solutions, takes the stage at 4pm PT to share more about this announcement and it will be live streamed! And I get the opportunity to walk the audience through the flow. If you want to watch the live stream today, head out at 4PM PT to: https://ibmgo.com/wow16/session/NhtQjL5BRJGM4FJqC

IBM Watson Workspace (aka WW aka "dubdub" as the cool kids would say) is currently invite-only.  All IBM World of Watson attendees have access to IBM Watson Workspace. They can just log in with their IBM ID/password that they used to register for the conference. Those attendees can invite as many people as they wish, and those in turn can also invite others. So if you don't have an invite yet, find someone that attended the conference so they can hook you up.

LikeMyIdea Demonstrates Idea Management with IBM Connections

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It's the last day of the first quarter and it's time to wrap up. I've been heads down working on various go to market activities for IBM Connections Next and even starting to think about what I'll say at the Social Connections VI User Group meeting in a couple of months (you ARE going, right??).

Idea management continues to be a hot topic. You may already be familiar with some partners who have extended the ideation capabilities in IBM Connections (hint: I've talked about them before in my blog).  

One of the solutions featured in the IBM Connect 2014 App Dev Throwdown was LikeMyIdea as you may have seen here.

LikeMyIdea not only integrates directly with IBM Connections, but it also users IBM BPM behind the scenes as yet another example of combining social with business processes. LikeMyIdea also provides a set of metrics to see top ideas, top voters, top submitters, etc.

Once the ideation managers are ready to execute on the ideas, LikeMyIdea presents a dashboard where you can assign people to execute on those ideas, specify a due date and then track it all seamlessly from one place.

Check out the 4 minute demo:


To learn more, check out LikeMyIdea in the Connections App Catalog.

Check out the New Social Business User Group Page

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Yesterday was the official launch of the Social Business User Group running on the latest IBM Social Business technology. The new site is running at SocialBizUG.org and is built on top of IBM Connections 4.0. It's another great example of building a community site on top of Connections..

On the site, members have the ability create profiles, connect with peers, read and write blogs and wikis, share files, and much more. You will want to go to the site and set up your account and your profile to get started.

Joyce Davis highlighted the following benefits of the new SocialBizUG.org site:

• More content—articles, blogs, whitepapers, webcasts, forum discussions, ideation blogs, wikis, and much more.
  
• Better design, better navigation—a more user-friendly design, refined navigation, re-designed pages, and added new features
• New ways to develop your personal network—find members based on their interests or areas of expertise and add them to your network.
• Ideation blogs—pick the brains of your colleagues and work together in online brainstorming sessions that foster collaboration, thought leadership, and new ways of thinking.
• Individual member blogs—share success stories, comment about the projects you’re working on, and more.
• Customizable user group pages—User groups can now post specific announcements or messages for their members on their own page, which is hosted on SocialBizUG.org
• User profiles—create a profile, upload photos and files, and share details about your skill set, projects, challenges, and more.
• Search capability—Search specific topics and get complete results in seconds.

So go out and check out the new site, www.SocialBizUG.org . New members can register for their free accounts there as well!

SnappArchive Converts Quickr Places to PDF Files

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SNAPPS last week announced that they have released SnappArchive to batch convert content in Quickr Domino places into PDF files.

This tool, available both as SaaS or on-premises, will help you with the process of managing Quickr places once collaboration in a particular place has reached completion.

Once this happens, you can use SnappArchive to quickly turn the place into a PDF, thereby preserving content in a format everyone can use.

From SNAPPS' website:

Whether you require regular archiving, are making a move to a file-based repository, need to provide your customers with documentation they can read, or have retention requirements, SnappArchive is a perfect solution to the end stage of your collaborative document lifecycle.

If this sounds useful for you, immediately reach out to SNAPPS as they are offering a free Proof of Concept for a limited time! That way, you can see what the output looks like and if it meets your need you can then go ahead and purchase the solution for use within your company.

To learn more, check out Rob's posting on SnappArchive here.

Social Scheduling Now in IBM Connections

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IBM Business Partner Intravision has created a great integration point between OnTime Group Calendar and IBM Connections. If you haven't heard or used OnTime before I suggest you check them out. They provide an awesome add on with a powerful and very slick group calendar interface.

OnTime also allows you to work with group calendars even when you are on the go by providing mobile access from your favorite mobile device.

The new integration point brings the power of OnTime Group Scheduling into communities in IBM Connections. The following video shows a demo of the integration. It shows a community being created in IBM Connections for team collaboration. One of the challenges of building a team is finding the people with the right skills at the right time. IBM Connections already makes it super easy to find people based on skills. This integration point, allows you to see someone's availability right on their Profile page within IBM Connections.

Once you have everyone in the community, you can quickly see everyone's availability today by just hovering over the names of team members, or you can even see a nice graphical representation for everyone's availability any date/time.

Finally, the Social Scheduling widget allows you to find people from various departments that are available at any given time. Very cool!!! Check out the quick video below:

This is a great example of the extensibility of IBM Connections via widgets. If you are interested in learning more about this, go to http://ontimesuite.com/ . And congratulations to the team for being nominated for a Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 award in the "Enabling Business Innovation through Social Collaboration".

Software Development Is Officially a Social Process

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I have talked a couple of times about socializing the social development process. For a while now, this integration has been available in technology preview mode.

At Lotusphere '11 #ls11 we announced that the integration would be ready for production by Q2 of this year. And it's coming in 7 days!

To get ready, you can watch a replay of a webcast that I announced earlier called Accelerate Software Delivery with Social Software webcast.

The integration will be available natively in Rational Team Concert 3.0.1 which will be available next week (June 14, 2011). The integration consists of:

• Integrated activity stream within Rational Team Concert (RTC)
• Ability to create activities directly from RTC (the activity will have a direct link back to the RTC workspace)
• Ability to create a blog directly from RTC
• Ability to surface the Connections business card directly within RTC
• Search for contacts from RTC
• Update your status and microblog directly from RTC
• Associate an RTC project with a community for direct access to community features (forums, wikis, blogs, etc) from RTC
• Connect RTC User Profiles to Connections Profiles
• and more..

Here's a quick demo that shows some of the integration points:

To learn more, visit the Social page in the Rational Jazz site and check out IBM's official press release here.

If you are already an RTC 3.0 user, you can simply download the connector from here (with source code). And if you are NOT using RTC, you can also download RTC for free from here (3.0.1 Release Candidate 3)

Quickr 8.5.1 User Essentials Course Now Available!

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I'm glad to see all these solutions become available for Quickr. Yesterday, I was made aware of a new course made available by wareSource called "Quickr 8.5.1 User Essentials".

Here's the description:

Social networking tools provide a way for people to communicate and interact online. Lotus Quickr is a key element of IBM’s “Social Business” initiative that provides a new competitive advantage with an integrated set of social networking tools.

During this course you will learn how to use Lotus Quickr to share all types of content with your colleagues down the hall or around the globe using online libraries, blogs, wikis, discussions, and shared calendars and task lists.

You will learn how to create and secure new Places while serving as a Place Owner and Manager, add content using a variety of Item types as an Author, and serve as an Editor to validate and revise content.

You will also install and use the Quickr Connectors to share and work on files directly from other desktop applications.

To get the full list of topics covered and view a free sample go here. The licensing for the course is by user so take a peek. This may be a great way to get your users up to speed with all the new great things in Quickr 8.5 for an affordable price.

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)

The Latest on the Quickr Connectors

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As Lotusphere #ls11 is now a dot in the rear view mirror, I'm still getting swamped with questions around the Quickr Connectors. For those of you who may not know, the connectors are a great way to get files in and out of team places. It integrates directly into your instant messaging client, email client (Notes and Outlook) and even to your Windows desktop. All of the actions available in the web UI are also available natively in the desktop (which really helps drive adoption).

In fact, I was surprised as I talked to customers from all over the world, their only interface with team places was through the connectors. Very few seem to use the Web UI. It was great to see how many people were leveraging this to improve their productivity. Here's a screenshot of how the integration looks in the desktop.

And because most people seem to rely more on the connectors than the web UI, I heard a lot of questions around future support. The top two questions?

1. When will the Quickr Connectors support Windows Explorer on Windows 7 64-bit?
2. When will the Quickr Connectors integrate natively (ribbon) into Microsoft Office 2010?

The questions were answered throughout various sessions at Lotupshere, including Ask The Product Managers which Mitch Cohen liveblogged (and you should go back and read if you haven't yet). In fact, in that session, Mac Guidera, the product manager for Quickr Connectors, announced that we have been working on it and should be available later this year.

As I mentioned before, post-Lotusphere I've also been swamped with these questions, so I figured I would recap the latest public information here and have something I can point others to very easily. If you want to know more details about the specifics and dates of when the Quickr Connectors will be updated, stay tuned to Mac's blog and this blog and you'll be the first to know.

Mark Your Calendars: Quickr Domino 8.5 Upgrade Webcast

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Tomorrow, Wednesday February 9th, we'll be hosting a webcast on upgrading your Quickr server to the latest version: 8.5. If you haven't upgraded to Quickr 8.5, you really have to. The latest release is amazing!

• What? - IBM Support team members hosting a webcast on upgrading to Lotus Quickr Domino 8.5
• When? - 9 / February / 2011 ; 10:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (15:00 GMT) (lasts 1 hour)
• Why? - To provide all the necessary info you need for the upgrade and answer your questions
• Where? - Webcast hosted here: https://www.lotuslive.com/en/join?schedid=4419191 . Worldwide conference number and passcode listed here.

If you can't make it, we'll be recording the webcast and will make it available later. However, I strongly encourage all of you to attend so that you can ask questions live to the experts on the call. And if you can't make it, I hope you have a good excuse like you are attending the IBM Social Business Jam.
If you have any questions that you would like the team to answer, please post them in advance here.

See you there tomorrow!

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.

IBM Software Helps Build the Chevy Volt

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Have you seen the Chevy Volt? Like it ? Here's a quick video that shows how IBM Software helped build the Chevy Volt.

In the video you'll see GM talk about their use of the Rational platform and how it was critical to the success of this car.

As you may know, I'm a pilot and I was impressed by the fact given in the video that an F35 fighter takes 6 million lines of code to run. The Chevy Volt takes 10 million lines of code!

And did you know that Rational Team Concert integrates very nicely with Lotus Connections? Social is Everywhere!

Check Out New Videos for Quickr 8.5

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You may be aware that 2 weeks ago IBM released the latest and greatest release of Quickr 8.5 for Domino. There's been tons of buzz around this release. For example,

• This Week in Lotus Episode 16 - What's New in Quickr 8.5 (with my new colleague David Kajmo)
• Taking Notes Podcast Episode 120 - Everything you wanted to know about Quickr 8.5 and more
• IdoNotes Episode 81 - Quickr 8.5, Collaboration University and FREE plug-ins

I won't repeat all the new features since there's just too many and others have covered it widely. However, I wanted to make you aware that tomorrow, Wednesday September 29th, there will be a webcast to talk about What's New And Improved in Lotus Quickr 8.5 at 10am EDT. For more information, click here.

Let me focus, however, on something you may have not seen. As you may know, I'm a big fan of videos. To my delight, a new page has been created to demonstrate some of the new features. You can embed these videos directly in your deployment (like I've done in my blog here) or you can download them and play them from your internal site.

Here's a video of one of my favorite new features: Calendar overlay and iCal support which lets you view your team calendar directly in Microsoft Outlook / Lotus Notes. And since Google Calendar supports iCal, my next to-do is see if I can overlay my Lotus Quickr team calendar with Google Calendar:

To view the other videos, go here.

Enjoy!