IBM Connections Files Plugins Now Supported on Mac

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Today, IBM released new plugins to make their social platform even more accessible for Mac users. Mac users now have one new plugin they can use directly from their desktop.

The first plugin is the Files plugin. The plugin allows you to access, share, and search all of your files. You can also view files that you have shared, files that have been shared with you, files that belong to a particular person, or all public files. Of course, having access to your files from your desktop is not a new capability per se. Users, including Mac users, have been able to use the free Adobe Drive software to access the files from Windows Explorer or Mac's Finder for quite some time.

Once you find the file you want, you can double-click to open the file or you can drag-n-drop the file into a new email message or instant message. IT will certainly love this feature since it will reduce the bandwidth required to constantly send files back and forth and it will also reduce storage needs. End-users will also like this feature because it'll help them save space and not hit their email quotas.

Here you can see the various views provided by the plugin.

One of the features that I really like is the ability to drag-n-drop files from my desktop directly into the plugin. When I do so, a dialog comes up asking if I want to upload the file to my personal file share, share with a one or more people, or simply make it private. I like this feature because I no longer have to manually open a browser, log on to the system, upload the file, etc. I can do it from a single drag-n-drop action and even notify users that I've uploaded a file.



The other plugin that was released was the microblogging or Status Updates plugin. The plugin integrates directly into my mail client and I can keep up with what's going on in my organization directly from the sidebar. Of course, applications like Connections Glue have existed for a while (which I **really** like), but I have to say that I like how it's nicely integrated into my email client.

As usual, the plugins are available for free and can be downloaded from the Lotus App Catalog. The direct link for the Files plugin is here and the direct link for the Status Updates plugin is here.

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Article first published as IBM Releases New Mac OS Plugin for Connections on Technorati.

Reto 2.0 2011 Awards

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Last Tuesday was the award ceremony for the Reto 2.0 competition. You may remember that I talked about this competition as well as last year.

The competition is open to all college students and is sponsored by IBM, HP, and Microsoft. The idea is to promote college students to build a web 2.0 application. The team built http://enterar.me which roughly translates to: learn . The goal of the site is to have a single view of news events that are happening around me and being shared by my friends. It pulls data from Twitter and Facebook and even includes sentiment analysis to show whether it's "good news" (e.g. the US government is debt free) or "bad news" (e.g. 9.8 Earthquake Hits Chile).

I think the portal has tremendous potential so I hope the students keep building on it and can eventually monetize it. For those of you who know Spanish, the URL is awesome!

Here's the newspaper clipping:

Reto20-2011

The winning team got a copy of Rational Team Concert ( the software development platform that is social) and a bunch of IBM goodies.

How To Use Twitter As Part Of Your Social Business Strategy

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One of the podcasts that I like to listen to frequently is The Social Hour (previously known as net@night) with Sarah Lane and Amber MacArthur. It's a good show to keep up with some of the consumer oriented social media tools. To me, it's another way to keep visibility as to what's happening out there and hopefully get ideas on what we can add into our platform.

About two weeks ago, I was at the AT&T store getting my iPhone replaced (I could hear people, but they couldn't hear me) and as I waited I was watching episode 14. In it, one of the listeners asks for tips / resources on where to learn more about social media tools for the enterprise. The listener had heard of Chatter, but wanted to learn what else was out there. I felt compelled to reply.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and in last week's episode Sarah and Amber covered oneforty.com founded by Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio). For those of you who haven't seen it, oneforty.com is a great resource for companies who want to leverage Twitter as one of their channels for social media. They have a free e-Book on Twitter 101 and showcase various apps that you can use with Twitter for analytics, advertising, marketing, brand monitoring, productivity and more. They also have a community which builds and maintains toolkits. A toolkit is a way to group multiple Twitter apps together. For example, Mashable has its own toolkit which highlights all the apps they use in their newsroom.

One of the apps that oneforty.com lists is IBM's Big Sheets which the University of Southern California uses as a Twitter Box Office Predictor. If you haven't yet, definitely spend some time at oneforty.com to learn how to build your social business on Twitter and watch the interview with the founder below.

Towards the end of the show, at about 48:10, Sarah and Amber read out my email that I had sent them. In the email I highlight some of the vendors in the enterprise social media world such as SocialText and Newsgator (I wanted to be as unbiased as possible). I also recommend to the listener to go out to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference website and check out all the information listed there so they can tell who the players are and who he may want to engage with.

Something that was not mentioned, however, is that another good way to learn more social media for enterprises is to follow the hashtags #e2conf and #socbiz in Twitter. Subscribe to those if you haven't yet.

I also gave a shout out to Luis Suarez who was interviewed by Amber back when it was net@night:

Needless to say, I'm excited that Connections got a mention in the show. Now I can tell my mom: "Hey, ma! Look, I'm on Twit!"

Free Webinar - Social Media Inside the Firewall

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Last Wednesday, Business Insider last week featured a tremendous article where they named IBM the Future of Social Business "because they are willing to invest, test, fail and succeed in becoming a social business". The author of the article, Mark Fidelman, interviewed IBM's VP of Social Software, Jeff Schick. The article talks about IBM's road to become a social business. In the article, Schick highlights the importance of social analytics as we move forward and make it easier for more and more people to create content.

Building on that, InfoBOOM will be hosting free webinar on Social Media Inside the Firewall at IBM. You may remember that about a year ago I was asked to do a 15-minute presentation at Public Relations conference. At that conference, I chose to talk about Social Media Behind the Firewall and shared my presentation over at Slideshare:

IBM's use of social media behind the firewall

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

For this week's webinar, I'll go through and update that presentation with the latest statistics, which coincidentally, were also highlighted in Business Insider's article last week (see below). I'll also be expanding a bit on why it's important to embrace social media behind the firewall.

As you can tell from those stats, social media tools are not just a fad at IBM, but they are actually part of our day-to-day processes! This is one of the lessons learned I'll be covering in the webinar.

If you are still on the fence on whether or not your organization can get value from social media tools inside the firewall, or if you simply want to learn more about how I use social media behind the firewall and why, I invite you to join the webinar. To register, click here.

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Article first published as InfoBOOM Hosts Free Webinar on Social Media Inside the Firewall on Technorati.

Social Software Implications in Regulated Industries

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A lot of companies are going through the process now to become a social business. While some of the companies that I have talked to have security and compliance as one of their top of mind issues, it still doesn't feel like the majority of companies are thinking about this.

Many have captured the benefits of social media in the enterprise. In my opinion, the benefits are undeniable and I feel that a lot of companies are going to deploy some sort of social media solution in their enterprise if they haven't yet. In fact, IDC reports that social software in the enterprise had a 32% growth in 2010.

Risks in Social Media

As with any collaboration too, regulated companies also see social media as a risk. For example, organizations in financial services, energy, healthcare, or government are subject to regulations such as FINRA, SOX, FERC, NERC, HIPAA, and FRCP to name a few. These regulations are defined by government and industry regulatory agencies and apply to communications via email, instant messaging and now social collaboration.

In Financial Services, for example, you want to prevent insider trading and avoid someone using microblogs or status updates where a broker may say "special rates, guarantee a 200% increase". In Healthcare, patient confidentiality is extremely important and it wouldn't be good if someone wrote in a wiki "Joe Smith is being treated for early coronary artery disease". I think you get the idea.

Managing Risks in Social Media

So what's a company to do? Certainly, not using social collaboration is not an option. Social software vendors are starting to offer solutions to help companies feel comfortable about social media. For example, as WebProNews reports, IBM recently announced their partnership with Actiance to provide a complete governance and eDiscovery solution for IBM Connections.

And building on that, IBM today announced new cloud-based collaboration services to help U.S. Federal government organizations reap the benefits of social computing. The new set of social collaboration services, delivered on IBM’s Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)-compliant Federal Community Cloud, addresses the administration's drive to adopt a "cloud-first" policy which is designed to help the government improve its overall IT efficiency and delivery of services to citizens. IBM's Federal Community Cloud is specifically designed to help federal government organizations respond to technology requirements more quickly. The secure, private cloud environment is part of IBM's established and dedicated Federal Data Center that provides secure and comprehensive certified computing capabilities to federal government clients.

From the press release:

“The rise in Big Data and the demand for transparency and collaboration will continue to put pressure on agencies to embrace new computing environments such as cloud to improve IT capabilities,” said Todd S. Ramsey, General Manager, IBM U.S. Federal. “IBM cloud collaboration solutions will help agencies gain faster access to the latest technologies, increase innovation across departments and ultimately improve citizen services.”

Get Social, But Don't Forget About Compliance

WebProNews recently interviewed my colleague René Schimmer to talk about these issues and I've included the video interview here:

Actiance has also created a really good presentation that I wanted to share with you along this topic: 10 Must Have Tips for Security, Productivity and Compliance of Social Collaboration

Social collaboration 10 must have tips for security, productivity and compliance

View more webinars from Unified Communications Online

So get on the social media bandwagon... but don't forget about compliance!!

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Article first published as Implications of Social Media in Regulated Industries on Technorati.