Mark Your Calendars: Webcast - Engage Your Customers with Exceptional Digital Experiences

Tweet

Next week, we'll be hosting a can't miss webinar on building Exceptional Digital Experiences. While the pace of business and the speed of content continue to accelerate, so does the demand to reach your audiences through a rich and robust digital experience on multiple devices. Customers and Employees alike expect the same high quality experiences whether externally on the web or internally on the company intranet.

Cars.com, for example, increased web site traffic by 145 million visits using an Exceptional Digital Experience.

Retailers, on the other hand, lost about $44 Billion in sales due to online customer experience problems:

At the webinar, Larry Bowden (VP of IBM Digital Experience Software), Nicole Carrier ( Chief Strategist of IBM Digital Experience Software), David Apanovich (Sr. Analyst of Forrester Research) and Aaron Pickrell (Director of Online Systems for Performance Bicycle) will share strategies to listen to your customers, deliver exceptional service and engage individuals and customers.

The webinar is on July 17th @ 11am ET. To register, go here.

New Theme Available for IBM Connections

Tweet

I'm happy to announce that we just made a new theme available for IBM Connections, IBM's enterprise social network (ESN). This theme was first shown at IBM Connect earlier this year and has been used by our cloud customers for a while now.

The feedback from our cloud customers has been extremely positive so far. I've also been getting a lot of requests from our on-premises customers that they would like to use this new theme. The good news for them is that the theme is available today and it's ready for download!

Here's how Connections looks with the new theme (Updated 10/Jul/2013 with new screenshot):

You can download the theme from our catalog here. Deploying the theme takes just a few minutes so go on and get it!

Note: Please read the read me ( hey, it's a good reminder! ) for system requirements and installation instructions.

Enjoy!

How to Extend IBM Connections in Less Than 100 Seconds

Tweet

Some time ago (5 years actually) I blogged about extending IBM Connections and integrating with Facebook in no time! My colleague Niklas Heidloff has now put together a series of videos of extending IBM Connections, IBM's enterprise social network (ESN), in less than 100 seconds.

In the video series, Niklas takes advantage of the IBM Social Business Toolkit and SDK to either add OpenSocial apps to Connections or use the API's to retrieve the information and aggregate feeds together. You will also want to follow their YouTube channel to stay informed when new videos are added.

The short videos do a great job demonstrating how quickly app developers can extend IBM Connections or build integrated apps on top of Connections.

So far, Niklas has published 5 videos which I've added to this playlist. I'll keep the playlist updated as new videos are added.

Enjoy!

Updated Mobile App for IBM Connections - Goodies for all

Tweet

Refresh your app stores, the latest monthly update is now available! A new mobile app update is ready for IBM Connections, IBM's enterprise social network (ESN) for collaboration. Last week, Chris Reckling did a great job summarizing the new features in the June 2013 release of native mobile apps.

My favorite feature is viewing events in the Action Required view of the activity stream. This view looks in the activity stream and can figure out which events require end user action. Thus, this view displays your latest to-do items from Activities, network and community invitations, requests to join moderated communities, and any third-party events requiring an action on your part.

For example, imagine an expense reporting application or a workflow application (e.g. IBM Business Process Manager ) where you are notified that you need to approve or reject something. You can do it directly from the activity stream, and now, directly from the mobile device!!! Mobile workers don't have to be a bottleneck anymore.

So if your App Store (or Google Play) icon looks like this:

it's time to update!!

Demo: IBM SmartCloud Connections Plug-In for Microsoft Windows

Tweet

As promised a few posts ago, I wanted to share a demo of the desktop plugin for IBM SmartCloud Connections, IBM's enterprise social network (ESN) offering in the cloud. Well, I was out last week when the plug-in was available so here it is! First, here's what you can expect to see and do from Windows Explorer, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook.

The IBM Connections Desktop Plug-ins for Microsoft Windows provides the following features from Microsoft Windows Explorer:

• Upload local files to IBM Connections from Windows Explorer or from your desktop
• Share uploaded files with people, communities, or folders in IBM Connections
• Work on files locally and publish them to IBM Connections
• View people's contact details and get in touch with them
• Pin, follow, or like IBM Connections files and folders
• View or contribute comments for a file
• Lock a file when you are editing it to prevent file conflicts
• View and restore files from IBM Connections Trash
• Share folders with IBM Connections Communities

The IBM Connections Desktop Plug-ins for Microsoft Windows provides the following features from Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel):

Word:

• Add a document to IBM Connections Files or Communities
• Attach a document to an Activity or Wiki page
• Publish a document to a Blog entry
• Add someone's profile information from IBM Connections into a document
• Add a bookmark from IBM Connections into a document
• Add a URL from a document as a bookmark in IBM Connections
• Search for content in IBM Connections

PowerPoint:

• Add a presentation to IBM Connections Files or Communities
• Attach a presentation to an Activity or Wiki page
• Search for content in IBM Connections

Excel:

• Add a spreadsheet to IBM Connections Files or Communities
• Attach a spreadsheet to an Activity or Wiki page
• Search for content in IBM Connections

The IBM Connections Desktop Plug-ins for Microsoft Windows provides the following features from Microsoft Outlook:

• Add an email to IBM Connections Files or Communities
• Attach an email to an activity or wiki page
• Search for content in IBM Connections
• View social activities for email recipients and people in your network
• Invite people to your IBM Connections network
• Outlook 2010: View IBM Connections business card for email senders and recipients

Check out the quick 3 minute demo below:

To download the plugin, you can get it from the Downloads page within SmartCloud. If you want to start a trial, go to http://ibmcloud.com/social