Social Collaboration Increases Productivity

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As part of the IBM Connections 4.0 launch last quarter, I participated in the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 event. IBM Connections has become my primary collaboration platform (anyone surprised by that). It enables me to become more productive and effective which is very important to me. I am one of the many mobile workers at IBM. One of the challenges for mobile workers is staying up to date with what's happening in the office and of course, remain visible so that you don't miss out on important career opportunities.

IBM Connections provides a unique activity stream because items in the activity stream are actionable. Line of business applications can be surfaced within IBM Connections and I can interact with them directly from there. What's more, with the IBM Connections mobile app, these line of business apps are instantly mobilized with no additional development.

That's what I focused on when I built the presentation below. I wanted to show how all these different applications are not only aggregated in a single place, but allow me to take action on them!

Staying Productive with Social Streams from Luis Benitez

And check out this video as well:

If you haven't yet, start leveraging activity streams to create a smarter workforce.

VSee Releases New Real-Time Integration for IBM Connections

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VSee has just released new integration where they have brought their real-time collaboration capabilities into IBM Connections.

The integration allows companies that already use VSee to:

• See a list of community members along with presence awareness
• Click-to-chat
• Instant video chat with community members
• Instant screen share with community members

Check out a quick demo below:

For more information and to access this integration, you can access it from the IBM Connections App Catalog here. And for those of you who are using IBM Sametime, of course you can do the same things with IBM Sametime as described here.

Announcing the IBM Connections 4.0 Plug-ins for Notes

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I'm pleased to announce that we have just released the latest IBM Connections 4.0 plug-ins for Notes.  Unlike previous releases, we've now combined all of the Notes plug-ins into a single install.

Here's a highlight of some of the new and enhanced features:

• NEW: attach a file to a status update
• NEW: like / unlike a status update
• NEW: Activity stream integration allows to monitor updates for all Connections services
• NEW: search by people and communities
• NEW: Lock/unlock files
• NEW: Connections 4.0 style UI (improved formatting and layout, enlarged images, additional content including like and comment counts).
• View status updates for your colleagues, communities or organization (support for "Discover" view).
• View your board or someone else's board.
• NEW:  Microblogging within a community
• NEW:  Post a file as attachment along with posting a Status Update.
• Support for Linux desktops

I believe that these plug-ins are extremely important in helping drive the adoption of the IBM Social Business platform.  A lot of customers have been re-iterating how powerful these plug-ins are since they bring the power of social to the end user, instead of forcing the user to learn a new interface and collaborate in a different context.

If you haven't seen the plug-in in action yet, I'll be posting a demo movie later. For now, here's a screenshot that I took last year and will be sharing more later this week:

You can download the plug-ins from our App Catalog as usual here.

IBM Study on Big Data and Social Reveals Less Than Half of Organizations Monitor Social Media

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Today, IBM has released a new study on Big Data and Social. The study was done in conjunction with Oxford University and looks at organizations are leveraging (or planning to leverage) big data. The reports is based on a global survey of 1,144 business and IT professionals from 95 countries and 26 industries. It provides a global snapshot of how organizations today view big data, how they are building essential capabilities to tackle big data and to what extent they are currently engaged in using big data to benefit their business.

Reading the report, several things stood out for me:

• Organizations across every industry – from retail and banking to healthcare and government – are trying to tackle big data to drive better business outcomes. And the research shows that the early adopters are gaining a competitive advantage.
• Most big data efforts are focused on improving the customer experience but less than half of the organizations currently analyze data from social media sites. This means that companies are missing out on HUGE insights into their customers
• A reason why social data is underutilized is because of a skills gap. For example, less than 25 percent of the survey respondents say they have the required capabilities to analyze highly unstructured data – a major inhibitor to getting the most value from big data

I definitely recommend reading this report to those involved in the analytics and social world.

To access the full report, visit: http://www.ibm.com/2012bigdatastudy. To learn more about what IBM is doing in Big Data, make sure you follow the Information On Demand conference next week.

The Benefits of Becoming a Social Business

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A quick video that was shared at the opening keynote of the Leadership Alliance conference two weeks back.

Are you ready to reap the benefits of becoming a social business ?

Go ahead and share and this video with your network.