5 Can't Miss Features of IBM Connections

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About two weeks ago, I was asked to present to a group of internal IBMers tips and tricks to get the most out of IBM Connections, our social collaboration platform.

I actually reached out to my internal network and asked for suggestions on a good topic. Quickly, I realized that everyone had their own favorite feature or aspect of the product.

That got me thinking that maybe it's worth me putting together a quick presentation that shows people how I get the most out of the product to improve my productivity.

Then it got hard. How could I pick just a handful of things where IBM Connections makes my life easier ?

I had to iterate a couple of times.  In the end I decided that a good way to format it would be to focus on 5 integration aspects that maximize the value I get out of the product.

Check out the slides that I took them through:

5 Can't Miss Features To Get The Most Out of IBM Connections from Luis Benitez

Do these match what you would've presented?

Social Connections VII Is Coming -- Check Out The Agenda and Register Now

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Re-sharing the news from Brian O'Neill, IBM Champion and IBM Connections user.

Social Connections, the IBM Connections user group, will have their 7th event this November 13th-14th in beautiful Stockholm, Sweden.

With a focus on IBM Connections and Social Business, this is a first-class event for the user community. If you are working with IBM Connections, I'd strongly recommend that you make every effort to attend!

In fact, earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend the conference in Prague and it was a fantastic experience.  It's invaluable when I have the a chance to talk directly to partners, customers, and users to gather feedback and share what we are doing with the portfolio.  If you haven't attended any of the events, check out this recent video from the Prague event:

Social Connections VI - two days of epic Connections content and conversation from Social Connections on Vimeo.

The agenda for the event was announced last week and you can get all the details here.  Now that' you've watched the video and taken a look at the agenda, the next step is to register!  Register for the next event!

Oh and don't forget to follow the team on Twitter and like their page on Facebook to keep up with all the news about the event.

New Release of IBM Connections Social Cloud Is Here

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Here's one way to start the week on a high note.  Over the weekend, we enabled the latest features for our Q3 (or fall release) of IBM Connections Social Cloud, which, as you can tell off the bat, features a new name and tons of goodies. Mitch and Chris had already shared the news about the new name, which we made public back in January of this year at IBM Connect 2014.

You may have already seen the blog from last week from Rebecca Buisan which previewed some of the things that we turned on this past weekend. Let me take the opportunity to go into a bit more detail.

First, you'll notice that we have a brand new site over at http://ibmcloud.com/social as you can see above. We want to make it easy to find what you need and direct your attention to what matters. As you may remember, last month we turned on video chat. This month, we've added features to make it easier to find experts, synchronize your files to the desktop, and increased engagement capabilities by using @mentions in more content areas (for example, forums, to-do's and more). I'm not fond of text, so check out this presentation for all the details of what's new:

What's New in IBM Connections Social Cloud - September 2014 from Luis Benitez

How's that for a release ? But wait...! There's more!



Developers.. we haven't forgotten about you!! We are launching a new site just for you over at http://developer.ibm.com/social (screenshot above) very soon. We are going to be doing some continuous updates to this page so expect to see more changes soon. Additionally, we've created a schedule to continuously share content with you via the team blog. This will get you more content from more people and gives a hand to the super awesome Niklas Heidloff. If you haven't subscribed to that one, do it now.

Want to get your hands on all of this? Start a trial today over at http://ibmcloud.com/social .

Up and Running with IBM Connections Now Available on Lynda.com

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I'm on my way to San Francisco, but I couldn't wait to share some fantastic news.  For some time now there have been some hints of new things coming to Lynda.

As you may have seen from teases in the past few weeks, today I'm happy to share that there's a new course available:  Up and Running with IBM Connections by Bruce Elgort.

Bruce and I collaborated on this, well, he actually did all the work, I just gave him a server to record on.

For those of you who haven't heard about Lynda.com, they are an online learning company that helps anyone learn business, software, technology and creative skills to achieve personal and professional goals. Through individual, corporate, academic and government subscriptions, members have access to the lynda.com video library of engaging, top-quality courses taught by recognized industry experts.

Not yet a Lynda.com subscriber? Try it out free for seven days. To see the course description, outline and get a quick intro (and a few free sections), click here.

More IBM Connections Social Features Now Available Inside Microsoft Office

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As you may know, we are now releasing new updates to the desktop plug-ins on a monthly basis. This month's release brings some cool new features to those of you working with Microsoft Office Desktop apps (even if you use the desktop apps with Office 365).

For some time now, we've had integration into Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook) via the ribbon.  Today, we've added new functionality to the ribbon.

With the new features, you can now do the following directly from Microsoft Office:

• Lock a file to prevent others from editing while you make changes
• Share the file and add others as readers or editors
• View version history
• View download history/audit log
• Like, pin, and follow

Check out this quick 2 minute demo that I created to show some of the new functionality:



To download the latest plug-in you can get it from Apps - Downloads on your cloud deployment, or from our app catalog here.