Grabbing your attention

Adrian Spender  February 22 2008 05:46:28 PM

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Special guest author, Adrian Spender!
I'm a software engineer in IBM's Dublin lab and am the technical lead on the new Home Page component of Lotus Connections 2.0. 2008 is my tenth year in IBM and previously to Connections I worked on the development of various middleware products including WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. I hold a degree in Information Systems from the University of Leeds in the UK.
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One of the pain points for a user of any social software system is handling the flood of data they have the potential to confront you with. Whilst Lotus Connections has the benefit of enabling people to share a wealth of knowledge and experience, so the sheer amount of information generated can have the capacity to overwhelm. Of course this is not a new problem; attention management has been been an issue since the early days of email.

From my own use of the IBM internal deployment of Lotus Connections I know that I suffered from not having one place to go to that would provide an aggregated view across the five constituent components. Of course, many times I would be drawn into some specific information; perhaps by a notification from the Activities component. Other times, in a spare five minutes, I would browse casually to the Blogs component or maybe to the Activities dashboard. I might find a blog entry or two that interest me and happen to be featured on the first page of entries. Alternatively, I might find an entry in one of my high-priority activities for which the author had not notified me. Whilst my casual browsing will likely find items of interest, they would most probably be isolated to the component I happened to visit. If I surfed over to Blogs there would be no hint that, actually, there may be a bookmark I really should consume over in Dogear. I ended up doing what my IBM colleague Luis Suarez (http://www.elsua.net ) refers to as "Following the river, not drowning on the lake" by just accepting that there's probably really interesting and useful stuff that has just passed me by.

Of course, with the fact that Lotus Connections exposes data via Atom feeds I could utilise a feed reader to subscribe to and consume the Blogs, Dogear bookmarks, Communities and Activities I was interested in. This is very valuable, but requires users to discover all those feeds and subscribe to them in the first place.
What I really needed was a single place I could go to where I could receive relevant and timely updates from across the components I use. Therefore, and as we demonstrated at Lotusphere 2008, we came up with the Lotus Connections Home Page.



The Home page is a single aggregated place to view Connections content in a way that suits you. It uses a widget-based drop and drag system to allow you to lay the page out as you wish. It provides widgets for each of the Lotus Connections components and each widget is individually customizable. For instance you can change the number of entries that the widgets show depending on how important that data is to you. The widgets also have different views allowing you to tailor the information displayed:



The Home page remembers your widget layout, view choice and customizations whenever you return. As a rule, widgets allow you to view more details about particular content without needing to navigate away from the Home page itself. We make heavy use of Ajax style techniques to allow you to browse through content and consume it. For instance, if you see a blog entry that catches your eye you can view it in a pop-up window:


One important feature of the Home page is that it is not limited to the widgets we will provide "out of the box" Organizations will have the ability to add third party widgets and indeed build their own to extend the data that the Home page can aggregate and consume.

So whilst the Home page allows users to pull all this data together how can people then find the information that is relevant to them? Well firstly, the we take advantage of the new capability in the Profiles component to allow people to build a network of colleagues. Home Page widgets will highlight content from colleagues you are associated with. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the Home page will provide a global search capability across all of the Connections components, allowing you to discover and show the the most relevant people, communities and content for the term you searched.




We aren't done baking yet, and hopefully you can expect even more to come from the Home page. As always we love to have feedback so please leave your comments - I promise we will read and digest them. The Home page is just one of the cool new features of the forthcoming Lotus Connections 2.0 and watch out for more information as we get nearer to release.

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