Connections 2.5 Preview - New services in Communities

Suzanne O Minassian  January 21 2009 06:17:57 PM

We’ve integrated all of the Lotus Connections services into Communities so that every Community can leverage Connections services and maintain membership and access across them. While Communities in previous version have had open/moderated/private membership with member API, bookmarks, a forum, and feeds, here are some of the new capabilities we’ve added.



Community Blog. Now, you can create a blog right from your Community. Owners of the Community or the members can be authors of new blog entries and just like with the current blog, you can moderate comments. The blog widget in the Community home page shows you recent entries and ratings and gives authors a button to quickly add new entries.

Improved Community Forum. The Community forum provides a much more detailed view of the number of entries, the number of replies, and other important information to let you know how active a thread is. The forum thread page also provides a new look that allows you to more easily track conversations.



Community Activities, including to-dos and events. Now, you can create Activities from your Community as well! Activities are very flexible and allow you to create to-dos for your Community owners or members, set up meetings and post information like date / agenda /  speaker / presentation files and materials and more.

Community Files. Communities now have a dedicated place to store files. But this isn’t just a simple file store. It is a social file sharing service that allows people to share any type of file with individuals, communities, or privately and also allows for rating, tagging, commenting, and subscriptions. There is more about this service in another post to come.

Community Wiki. Connections now has its own wiki service which can be accessed on its own or integrated to a Community. There is more about this service in a subsequent post so stay tuned!

[I need to make a disclaimer here that anything shared in these blog entries is undergoing development and is subject to change! Do not consider these designs final in any way. They are current as of today but they may change. Also capabilities are always subject to change as well. I’ll be repeating this disclaimer over and over again. Sorry!]

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