Check out the New IBM Social Business TV Ad Premiering Today

Tweet

IBM continues it's big push on Social Business (one of the 4 key areas of our Smarter Planet strategy along with Mobile, Cloud, and Analytics).

By now, you may have seen a recent article we published on the Wall Street Journal on competing in the Era of "Smart". This new TV ads are the next step in driving attention to the power of a social business.

Starting today, the following TV ad will be running in the United States during the Masters Golf Tournament coverage on both CBS and ESPN.

Check out the ad:

For those of you interested, the mobile TV ad is here and the analytics one is here.

Spread the word!

IBM Connections 4.5 Reviewer's Guide is Ready for Download

Tweet

The news about IBM Connections 4.5 keep on rolling. Today, I'm happy to communicate that the Reviewer's Guide for IBM Connections 4.5 is ready for download.

If you haven't read one of our Reviewer's Guide before and you are not sure what it is, here's the description:

This Reviewer's Guide provides a brief summary of the applications that are included in IBM Connections 4.5. It is important to note that these applications can be used within an organization as needed—all together or as individual applications. Capitalizing on a flexible and modular architecture, organizations may start with a single application and add other applications when they choose. As in previous releases of IBM Connections, applications can be installed easily and naturally fit into the user experience, so it is easy to expand as needed.

Therefore, if you are looking for an end-to-end review of the features in the release and it's capabilities, this a great document to go through, all 94 pages of it. We've also included tons of screenshots as well.

I have embedded the document here so you can preview it:

sdf

To download it, go here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/connections/connections45reviewersguide/index.html

Announcing the new Social Business Data Center in Germany

Tweet

Today, IBM is announcing the availability of a new data center for Social Business in Europe.

The new facility in Germany will serve the needs of customers in Europe interested in our cloud-based social business offering: SmartCloud Connections. Just like with our data centers in the US and Asia, customers would be able to use the latest and greatest, including IBM Docs.

The momentum towards the cloud continues to show signs of growth and with this new data center we'll be positioned to better serve customers in that region. All data will remain in the European Union (EU) which eliminates data privacy concerns and legal overhead since data is not transferred outside of the EU.

Here's a customer testimonial that was published earlier this week from Colleagues in Care and how they get value from IBM Docs and SmartCloud Connections:

And here's another customer testimonial:

For more information, check out the press release here: http://ibm.co/10xAfp2

Preview: Polls and surveys for IBM Connections

Tweet

Now that we are officially in second quarter and IBM Connections 4.5 shipped, I can talk a little bit more about more things coming this year, specifically this quarter. Coming in a few weeks is a new add-on for Connections that will add polls and surveys.

With this add-on, community managers will be able to:

• Use a question-based authoring tool to create polls and surveys directly from the community
• Configure who can see results
• Configure if results are tied to a user or collected anonymously
• Notify members via the activity stream. Members will be able to respond via the embedded experience (even from their mobile devices)
• Notify members via an email notification. Members will be able to respond via the embedded experience (requires a modern email client such as IBM Notes 9).
• and much more...

The Product Manager for this offering is Marty Lechleider so if you have any questions (such as licensing), reach out to him. In fact, Marty created the following demo to show off the new capabilities of Forms Experience Builder "Next" and how it integrates seamlessly into IBM Connections:

Enjoy!

Demo: What's New in IBM Connections 4.5

Tweet

By now, you have downloaded IBM Connections 4.5, which was released last Friday, and perhaps even upgraded to that release.

Over the weekend, the information development team published this video. You can use this video to share with your end users and give them a tour of the new features in this release. (share it via a blog!)

Note that this video is specific to just the new features added in this release. If you are looking for an overview demo of IBM Connections 4.5, then check this out.

The video also covers the new Connections Content Manager and there will be another video released in the next couple of days focused on just that particular add-on for those of you interested in a deep dive.

Stay tuned for more!