IBM Ranked as Leader in the 2014 Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software

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And the great news keep piling up on the heels of the IBM Connections 5.0 rollout.

The latest to hit the wire is that IBM Connections has been ranked as a Leader in the Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software.  This is in addition to the Forrester Wave report where IBM came out as a leader in the Enterprise Social Software Wave a couple of weeks back and the news that IBM Connections continues to be the market leader in enterprise social software !

According to their announcement, the report evaluates 20 social collaboration vendors against 3 dimensions: Strategy, Performance, and Reach. Based on the evaluation of each vendor, each vendor is placed in 1 of 4 spheres: Leader, Innovator, Specialist or Contender. Again, IBM was ranked as a Leader.

Aragon called out the purposeful use of social as one of the differentiators of the IBM Connections platform:

IBM is leveraging Connections across its software portfolio, including its social HCM (Kenexa) product line

Aragon delivers high impact research and advisory services to provide enterprises the insight they need to help them make better technology and strategy decisions.

A great example of a customer reaping the benefits of becoming a social business with IBM Connections is CEMEX who has actually measured the ROI of their Social Business journey with IBM Connections.  They shared an update of their recent success stories a few weeks back:



If you want to read the report, you can get it from Aragon here.

Building towards the IBM Connect 2014 OGS

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As IBM Connect 2014 continues, I just got my hands on this video which shows how the production team came in and built the stage and got everything ready for the IBM Connect 2014 Opening General Session. Think of this as a behind the scenes look on how everything comes together for the show. If you are here, I am curious to know... What has been your favorite thing so far ??

Check out the credits at the end. My favorite is the Costume Designer .

 

Posted with Blogsy

SNAPPS Announces SnappLinks for IBM Connections

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Today, I'm glad to share the news that SNAPPS, a long time IBM partner and whose founder is an IBM Champion, has announced new extensions for the IBM Connections rich text editor.

The rich text editor is part of several IBM products including Connections. The editor in Connections can be extended with additional buttons and features and SNAPPS has taken advantage of this.

With SnappLinks™, you can use your editor -- in your applications with XPages or with the IBM products -- to create and share the public social experience across intranets, on the web with suppliers, and in teams. SnappLinks™ is integrated directly into the editor and lets you connect to these social, public networks: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. In other words, Get Social Do Business in a way that's natural and easy for your users.

In addition to the helpful social linking features, SnappLinks delivers a rendering engine to IBM Connections to let users view YouTube videos, Google Maps, and Facebook feeds right on the page!

Check out this 3 minute demo to see how it works!

To learn more, go here. Note: SNAPPS is running a promotion where they are offering this at 25% off and 35% off for those attending IamLUG this week. Take advantage of that!

IBM Connections 4.5 Is Ready for Download

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The day has come! IBM Connections 4.5 is ready for download!! Partners can get the software from PartnerWorld and customers from Passport Advantage.

Let me summarize give you a couple of pointers to help you get ready to deploy:

• What's New Presentation - http://www.lbenitez.com/2013/03/replay-of-ibm-connections-45-launch.html
• IBM Connections 4.5 Documentation - http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/xpDocViewer.xsp?lookupName=IBM+Connections+4.5+documentation#action=openDocument&content=catcontent&ct=prodDoc
• IBM Connections 4.5 System Requirements - http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27037782
• IBM Connections 4.5 Plug-in for IBM Notes 9 - http://www.lbenitez.com/2013/03/new-ibm-connections-plug-ins-for-ibm.html
• Planning your upgrade to IBM Connections 4.5 - http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21626551
• Redbook: Installing and deploying IBM Connections - http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0994.html?Open

Next week, I'll share two new videos to show explicitly a demo of what's new in IBM Connections 4.5 and also a deep dive on the new IBM Connections Content Manager. So stay tuned for that. For now, check out this demo which shows an overview of IBM Connections 4.5:
Now, I'm curious to know who will be the first to go into Production with 4.5

Replay of Monthly ICS Webcast featuring IBM Connections 4.5 &Connections Content Manager Webcast Now Available

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Yesterday I presented at the monthly IBM Collaboration Solutions webcast. The topic? Of course: IBM Connections 4.5 and IBM Connections Content Manager.

As Joyce Davis posted late last night, the replay is available for those that missed it (tip: you should never miss a Joyce Davis webcast) or for those who want to see it again.

There was a technical glitch with my computer where it decided to alert me that I had run out of disk space (must be all those demo movies!). After several minutes, I was able to recover and you can enjoy the fun below. I was also very happy to know that more than 80% of the attendees were planning on upgrading to version 4.5 to enjoy the new content management capabilities. Remember, the download of 4.5 will be available this Friday!

Webcast replay:

I have also shared the presentation over at SlideShare:

What’s New in IBM Connections 4.5 and IBM Connections Content Manager from Luis Benitez

If you want to download a copy of the original presentation, you can find it here on Greenhouse.

How To Create a Social Portal for Exceptional Web Experiences

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This video takes a deep dive on how to create a Social Portal for Exceptional Web Experiences. The social layer is provided by IBM Connections and using the new social rendering portlets you can create a great and compelling experience with a few clicks and, most importantly, with no coding skills required.

This is very useful when you want to open up Connections to users outside of the organization and/or you want to socialize an existing web front.

All of these capabilities are available today so there's no need to wait!

Update on 27/Mar/2013: I've embedded part 2 of the series and thanks to Ken Krause for doing this!!

Enjoy

Check out the new IBM Connections Plug-In for Microsoft Outlook

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We have just released the new IBM Connections Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook ! This enhances the existing integration that we provide via the native Outlook Social Connector capability. However, we found that Microsoft implemented this in a limited way since it only provided "read-only" access to the social network.

Therefore, we took the integration to the next level and added a brand new sidebar to Outlook to provide access to files, microblogging, communities and more. And you can interact with your social network all directly from Microsoft Outlook!

By bringing social to the end user, you can accelerate adoption, reduce time to value, and reduce training costs as users that live and die in Outlook don't have to learn anything new to interact with IBM Connections.

Here are some of the features:

• Share files easily – send links instead of attachments.
• Drag and drop email messages and attachments from Outlook to the IBM Connections sidebar application to upload them to IBM Connections.
• Search Connections files directly from Outlook.
• Search people by name, job title, organization, etc.
• View complete Connections profiles.
• Initiate a chat with a colleague directly from the sidebar application.
• Receive live updates from your colleagues, communities you follow, and when changes are made in files you follow.
• View community files and updates.

Here's a quick 5 minute demo showing this off:

To download the plug-in, go here or find it directly in our App Catalog .

Demos of IBM Notes 9 and IBM Connections 4.5 Launch Now Available

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By now you know that this week we launched IBM Notes 9 and IBM Connections 4.5. On Wednesday, we had a webcast to launch these two products.

At the webcast we had Ray Wang, from Constellation Research, kick things off by talking about the 9 C's of collaboration.   

During the webcast, Scott Souder and myself did demos of our respective products. Those demos are now available online in case you missed it (or you want to see it over and over and over again! )

Here's the IBM Notes 9.0 demo:

Here's the IBM Connections 4.5 demo:

The full replay of the launch webcast is also available here.

Enjoy!!

Questionmine Brings the Power of Surveys and Video to IBM Connections

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At the IBM Connect 2013 conference, Questionmine demonstrated their latest integration with IBM Connections.

Questionmine provides the ability to create interactive webinars with video surveys to engage the audience. This can help you generate real-time feedback and accelerate decisions.

Leveraging the activity stream and OpenSocial support within IBM Connections, Questionmine can quickly distribute videos to users. As the video plays and gets to a specific time, the question comes up and the user can respond instantly. After the response has been submitted, the video continues to play. To analyze all the data, Questionmine provides a dashboard for administrators to go in and get insights.

In the following demo, you can see a marketing manager at Pepsi creating questions and then sharing them as part of a video within IBM Connections and request feedback, specifically to see what others think about a new TV commercial that's going to go live soon.

To learn more, check out their website or if you are going to SXSW next week, check them out at stand 344.

Dynamic Signal Helps Amplify Your Brand Using IBM Connections

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The news from IBM Connect 2013 just keep coming in. As I've shared in the past, one of the highlights of the #IBMConnect conference was the App Dev Throwdown where many new partners got to showcase their integration with IBM Connections.

Dynamic Signal, an employee marketing solution allows you to reward employees for their participation in external social networks like Facebook. Let's say, for example, that your company is launching a new product and you want to get your employees to help you promote it. Dynamic Signal provides an interface to create a campaign and track employee participation in it. Employees can promote company news from IBM Connections directly with Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more!!

This solution is a perfect combination of social business and social media and takes IBM Connections to the next level!

Check out this 4 minute demo:

Very cool!!!! Go check out their solutions today!!

Infoware Announces New IBM Connections Admin Tool

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With 3 days to go for the start of #IBMConnect, Infoware has announced a new web-based IBM Connections administration tool called DomainPatrol Social.

This tool has many capabilities such as:

• merge communities together
• move content in and out of communities
• manage user access to the applications

Check out this 2 minute demo that shows how an administrator can easily merge two IBM Connections communities together.

To learn more, check out their offering in the IBM Connections app catalog, here. Infoware is going to be at IBM Connect in booth #C26 so make sure you go check them out to see the solution live!

OpenSocial Quickly Grows In The Enterprise and the IBM Connections App Ecosystem

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Many app developers have taken advantage of the new support for OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections to build apps for the worldwide market leading social business platform.

TemboSocial, for example, has added peer recognition to IBM Connections and integrates into the activity stream and provides OpenSocial embedded apps . ISW who has built a gamification layer for IBM Connections has also taken advantage of the OpenSocial integration points. AppFusions has also used OpenSocial to integrate Atlassian's JIRA, Confluence and Stash with IBM Connections as shown in the demo below.



And there's plenty plenty more! In fact there's over 200 partners attending the Ready for Social Business Showcase at the IBM Connect reference.

With the #IBMConnect conference just a few days away, it's likely more app developers will start taking advantage of this as well. At the conference, there will be an App Dev Throwdown where 14 companies will showcase their new solutions. The winner will be featured during Wednesday morning's keynote.

The conference is also a great opportunity to get even more app developers on board. At the IBM Connect conference, app developers can learn in the following sessions how to use OpenSocial within the enterprise. Here's a list of all the App Dev and/or OpenSocial related sessions at the conference. Make sure you add them to your calendar:

• AD101: Social Applications Made Easy with the New Social Business Toolkit SDK
• AD103 : Social Standards Across IBM Connections, IBM Notes, IBM iNotes and IBM Domino
• AD104: IBM Connections Activity Stream Integration with OpenSocial
• AD206 : IBM Lotus Domino XPages: Embrace, Extend, Integrate
• AD212 : Whats New in IBM Lotus Notes Widgets and LiveText: Linking Your Data to the World!
• AD405: Empower your Social Business with SAP Processes in the Activity Stream
• AD407: Qualifying Round for App Dev Throwdown I
• AD408: Qualifying Round for App Dev Throwdown II
• BP209 : In The Land of Social Apps, the API is King
• CUST108: How 3M Integrated SAP into the Activity Stream Using OpenSocial
• ID101 : What's New in IBM iNotes 9.0 Social Edition
• INV110: App Dev Strategy: Coding Social Business Applications
• INV211 : The New Social Business Paradigm with OpenSocial
• INV213: The Roadmap for Enterprise Social: From Social Email to Universal Activity Streams
• JMP102 : Extending Your App Arsenal With OpenSocial
• JMP202: Extending IBM Connection to Build an Exceptional Social Learning Platform
• SHOW301: Becoming a Connections Developer: Lessons from the Field

As you can see, with IBM's backing of OpenSocial 2.0, OpenSocial continues to take over the enterprise!

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Posted in OpenSocial.org.

Ephox Demonstrates Enhanced Rich Text Editor for IBM Connections

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Ephox has just released a new video demonstrating their EditLive! Rich Text Editor embedded within IBM Connections.

EditLive! for IBM Connections simplifies content creation within Connections’ Communities, Wikis, Blogs, Profiles, Activities and Forums. By upgrading the embedded rich text editor in Connections with EditLive! you add powerful tools that help users collaborate, address accessibility issues, edit images, check for errors, and produce great content.

Some of EditLive! for IBM Connections benefits include the ability to:

• Create content compliant with accessibility standards.
• Track changes and comment directly on their content.
• Crop, resize, rotate and edit images seamlessly.
• Copy and paste images and text from anywhere, including MS Office.
• Avoid embarrassing mistakes with spell check as you type.
• Create and edit tables easily with comprehensive table editing tools.
• Build custom features and controls.

Check out the 5 minute demo below:

To learn more about Ephox Live! for IBM Connections, go to the IBM Connections App Catalog or directly here. Ephox will also be at #IBMConnect so make sure you go check them out.

TemboSocial Demonstrates New Integration with IBM Connections

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In mid 2012, TemboSocial introduced the world to their peer-to-peer recognition add-on for IBM Connections, the market leading social business platform.

As we are now 14 days away from IBM Connect, TemboSocial has announced new integration options with IBM Connections 4.0, the latest release in the market of IBM Connections. It's extremely exciting to see how the partner eco-system for IBM Connections has grown and that they are keeping their solutions up to date with our latest release.

In their latest release, TemboSocial now takes advantage of the Connections business card to show more information about users, and integrates into the Activity Stream. As peers recognize each other, the action is reflected in the IBM Connections Activity Stream, and users can take advantage of the embedded experience to like, comment, share and print events right from there.

TemboSocial has also extended the IBM Connections Share capability to allow end users to recognize others right from that interface. Check out the quick 5 minute demo below:

TemboSocial will have a booth at IBM Connect so make sure you go check them out! If you want to see more capabilities available for IBM Connections, make sure you register and attend IBM Connect in 2 weeks!

Gamification Goes Mobile with IBM Connections and Kudos

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As things ramp up for IBM Connect in 18 days, news tid bits are slowly starting to come out as to what's going to happen during the premier Social Business conference.

At IBM Connect, we are going to have an App Dev Throwdown where developers will have a chance to showcase their Social Business solutions built on the IBM Social Business platform. Make sure that you don't forget to go to that session to see all the new cool integration points developers are working on.

In the second release of Kudos, the gamification add-on for IBM Connections, it has been integrated into the native IBM Connections mobile app you can get from the iTunes App Store and/or Google Play. Kudos already tracks all actions done by a user either via the browser interface or the native mobile apps. Now, users can view their badges, the leader board and even Give Thanks to others directly from the app. They can also see their progress towards the various missions/achievements.

Check out the demo of the gamification module in mobile. While this is shown in an iPhone, this also works in the native IBM Connections iPad app.

This is extremely cool work so kudos to the Kudos team (see what I did there??).

To learn more about this solution, make sure that you register to attend #IBMConnect today!

Demo: Integrating Office365 into IBM Connections via Google App Engine

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Earlier this week I stumbled upon this video on YouTube that shows how you can integrate Microsoft Office365 into IBM Connections. IBM Connections continues to be the #1 social business platform according to IDC, so it makes sense that it's quickly becoming the go to collaboration platform for many businesses. Connections' support for the OpenSocial standard has opened the doors to reuse many existing integration points as well as reach out to a new breed of app developers. Feedback from developers has been tremendous in this area, especially because IBM also supports OpenSocial in its native apps for iOS and Android.

In the demo below, Michel from e-office demonstrates how you can use the Google App Engine to push events from Office365 into the IBM Connections activity stream. You can take a document and upload it to Office365, check-in, check-out etc and visualize from IBM Connections. You can even use the embedded experiences concept that IBM invented to interact with Office365 and preview files directly from IBM Connections.

I'll be sharing a couple of more examples as we lead up to #IBMConnect in 3 weeks, the premier social business conference.

Demo: Social CRM Powered by IBM Connections

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A successful social selling strategy takes advantage of converged collaboration, dynamic content, and analytics. IBM now offers an open standards-based, security-rich platform for social business that combines these capabilities.

The solution, built on IBM Connections, can help your sales organization to reach people, engage them, discover new insights, and act swiftly to capture value.

Until now, CRM and sales force automation solutions have focused on managers managing employees and data with little attention to selling. The solution provides sales teams with tools that enable them to focus on selling by combining traditional CRM with analytics and collaboration.

Socially enabling your sales processes helps you create a sales team that:

• Spends more time selling
• Can easily tap the wisdom of top sellers and experts.
• Understands your customers better than the competition.
• Only focuses on critical data and deals.

Check out this demo of Social CRM powered by IBM Connections:

To learn more, make sure you attend the Social CRM sessions at IBM Connect !

Announcing IBM Connections Hypervisor Edition

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Today, IBM announced the availability of IBM Connections on PureSystems. PureSystems allow Ability to maintain and update through a single console with zero downtime. The same capability was released for WebSphere Portal earlier in the year (to learn more click here ).

A social business recognizes that people do business with people and optimizes how people interact to accomplish organizational goals. IBM Connections empowers people to easily connect with employees, partners, and customers, helping businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, to optimize collaboration. The new IBM Connections pattern for use with PureSystems allow organizations to focus critical resources on value add activities by significantly reducing installation and configuration times.

If you are not familiar with PureSystems, check out this video to learn more:

WebSphere Portal has also been available for PureSystem since earlier this year. In this demo you can see how easy and fast it is to deploy Portal and now you have the same capability for IBM Connections:

Using IBM Connections Hypervisor Edition 4 can help enable better utilization of hardware and faster response to demands for newly deployed systems. This can help to reduce both hardware and software operation costs, and maintenance costs. By deploying virtual images, businesses can also leverage a known, stable, and tested configuration, which can help reduce the potential for errors and reduce time to deployment of a working system, whether for development, test, or production. By making the deployment easier, organizations can focus their investment on social business adoption.

IBM Releases 2012 Tech Trends Report

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Today, IBM has released the 2012 Tech Trends Report covering mobile, cloud, social and analytics. The 2012 Tech Trends Report is based on a survey of more than 1,200 professionals who make technology decisions for their organizations (22 percent IT managers, 53 percent IT practitioners and 25 percent business professionals). Our respondents come from 16 different industries and 13 countries, spanning both mature and growth markets.1 To better understand how technology trends are impacting future IT professionals, we also surveyed more than 250 academics and 450 students across these same countries.

Something that stands out from the report is a skill gap that may threaten progress by businesses to adopt these technology shifts. And the report doesn't just highlight these skill gaps, it actually gives concrete recommendations for business and IT leaders as well as for IT practitioners.

I also found interesting the rate of adoption. Globally, only 34% of companies have adopted Social Business. And as you can see from the Infographic below countries like Brazil , South African and Spain stand out since almost more than half of the companies have adopted social business, demonstrating a huge opportunity still worldwide.

Check out the info graphic below (hover over the different elements to learn more):

As part of the report, IBM has developed a set of videos that feature technology experts by topic area (analytics, cloud, mobile, social, security) offering their opinions on the skills gap, what types of skills students and professionals need, as well as prescriptive advice on how people can get skills in these specific technology areas. In this video, Doug Heintzman describes what people should think about when developing social business skills.

The video the other videos playlist is here. To download the report, click here.

Using IBM Connections Demos Now Available

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When IBM Connections 4.0 was released, I shared the IBM Connections 4.0 Overview demo. That's a great way to get your users excited for what's new in the 4.0 release. And as you know, I'm a big fan of videos and I think they are a great way to drive adoption.

Now as your users look for more in-depth demos of the capabilities of IBM Connections, you can use the following which are available in YouTube. And here's a tip! When you share these videos with your users, simply post them in a Wiki or a Blog in your Connections deployment to help spread the word.

Make sure you watch all these videos. I recommend the one for Search so you can see the new Trending widget that was added into IBM Connections 4.0. It's very cool!

Homepage

Activities

Blogs

Bookmarks

Communities

Connections Mail

Files

Forums

Moderation

No video, but I did want to highlight this awesome document posted to ibm.com. And if you are interested in a video, then I can offer this one on how to customize existing reports that ship with IBM Connections 4.0.

Search

Wikis