Synch.rono.us

Australian Bureau of Statistics uses IBM Social Software

Suzanne Livingston — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:46:29 -0400

This week, IBM announced the Australian Bureau of Statistics' use of IBM Lotus Connections software to help its 3,000+ employees collaborate. In addition top national daily paper The Australian among others featured the news:

The offices of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have been decked out with wikis, blogs and instant messaging after the agency deployed a social-media platform for its 3200 staff. --ZDNet (link)

The organisation has announced that is adopting IBM social software to support the way thousands of employees connect and interact. ... "With Lotus Connections, ABS can use business-grade social software, straight out of the box." -- Government News (link)

the department’s chief of technology infrastructure, Duncan Young, found that, while the implementation started off as normal in the ABS technology e-division, it had become one of the easiest rollouts so far, thanks to enthusiasm amongst staff. .... “It’s probably the first one I’ve seen that’s been taken up in a viral type fashion.” --Computerworld (link)

Try out Lotus Connections 3.0 Beta on Greenhouse

David A Brooks — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:21:23 -0400

A little over a week ago, Lotus Greenhouse upgraded its deployment of Lotus Connections to a beta of our release stream. Interested in seeing LC 3.0? Try it on Greenhouse.

Sustainable Communities: Top 10 CSFs for Keeping the Faith

Katrina Pugh — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:19:46 -0400

Today we have a special guest post from Kate Pugh, consultant and author with many years of experience helping teams and communities share knowledge, build relationships and reach their full potential. We're looking forward to her book Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Manager Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam, due out in 2011! Thanks for your post today, Kate!

______________________________________________________________________

Overview: Launching and getting up and running is only half the battle when it comes to CoPs. CoP pundits are constantly advocating new social technologies, new processes, and new metrics. But for a CoP (and its members) to thrive requires embracing a few simple organizational change ideas, and making them concrete, authentic, and fun. The “Sustainable Communities Critical Success Factors” do just that. A sustainable Community of Practice (CoP) demonstrates measurable value to both the organization and CoP participants contributing relevant knowledge, and nourishing lasting and productive relationships. Any CoP, by definition, convenes to cross organizational boundaries, to build a shared body of knowledge, and to network. But a sustainable CoP comes together with a shared sense of passion and applies that to practical outputs. While most COPs fade, sustainable CoPs endure:

Members express a spirit of volunteerism that beyond their personal objectives and “WIIFM”;
CoP “working groups” generate relevant products that integrate diverse insights; and
CoP outcomes show up in corporate metrics, and, ultimately CoP ideas influence corporate planning.

The virtuous cycle above came to me over ten years of trial and error as a member or leader of about 50 CoPs. I found that getting the CoP started was just the tip of the iceberg. To endure, a CoP must have both the fortitude to withstand criticism, and flexibility to evolve as the market changes. That requires a regular tuning to the corporate goals (in green, “strategic alignment”), a great sense of process (“facilitation”), and even a bit of shameless self promotion (“recognition”). Sustainable CoPs begin with a common sense of need. Members believe that the community is essential to their individual effectiveness (e.g., market presence, knowledge currency, sounding board), and that wholeness of the community is essential to their own wholeness. For example, a member’s departure represents a loss of insight or perspective. Effectively, members share a sense of “fate.” Sustainable CoPs transform that sense of fate into a shared personal commitment. That is, beyond charters and metrics. Reaching across boundaries, members gain a certain “faith” that the CoP is a worthy haven, e.g., for courageous work and unprecedented outcomes. This sense of “faith” is not always dependable, and it is certainly not “free.” Where my CoPs have found this, they’ve been intentional about how they build, engage, or restore that CoP commitment. Over time, I’ve come to believe in this simple equation:

Shared Fate + Intention = Shared Faith

Sustainable Communities’ Ten CSFs

I’ve tried to boil down CoP practices that I’ve picked up along the way into “Critical Success Factors,” or CSFs. I’ll share the highlights. I’m not putting them in any particular order, except, perhaps how they became apparent to me as I failed at different ways of managing and participating (sometimes taking rejection too personally), and rethought my approaches. Here are the Ten CSFs, in brief:

1. Regular Real-time Meeting: Meeting regularly in person or virtually creates connection, a sense of belongingness, and an experience of “showing up for each other.” For both participant and listener, the real-time conversation -- with its cadence, inflection, and direct interaction-- goes far beyond text-only dialogue to help transform interaction into co-creation.

2. Role/Charter-Clarity: Avoiding two common CoP hazards, ambiguity and scope-creep, requires role clarity for the community. The charter clarifies where you are going (and why a CoP is suitable for that journey). Role definitions succinctly show the workings of the CoP operation to any member or onlooker. Role definitions are just as essential for community members at large, as they are for the Core Team, the working group leaders, and the Sponsors.

3. Leadership and Facilitation: To hang together, all communities need some form of governance. An effective leader-group generally includes the Sponsor, the Core Team, and Working Group leaders. The Core Team is like the power company. Facilitating, networking and representing the community to the Sponsor, they open the current, light up new houses, and provide a sort of grid for finding members’ energy. The Working Group leaders are like electrical switches. They play a crucial role in directing community members’ energy toward agreed-upon CoP “products.”

4. Practitioner-Led: CoP's are considered effective and “value-added” only when they are led by the practitioners. In other words, even while social media experts may step in to help jump-start the group’s formation, practitioners are the most credible leaders. (Just a note of caution: Make sure that a enthusiastic [read: dogmatic] subject matter expert is not also the facilitator, lest they dominate the thought and crowd out the learners or explorers.)

5. Establish Rapport Explicitly: To build CoP member engagement, leaders use facilitation moves and off-line check-ins with participants. For example, my Core Teams have “dialed for dollars,” each of us checking in with a handful of members at random between full-membership meetings. I’ve often come out of those calls with improvement ideas, working group volunteers, and new member candidates.

6. Ground Rules: Just as the routine meeting is critical, so too are ground rules -- the conduct and overt expression of shared values in the meetings. For example, IBM’s Rawn Shah identified nine “guidelines” at the E2.0 meeting in Boston June 14th, including such unconventional “rules” as “Be the first to respond to your own mistakes,” and “Be who you are.”

7. New Member On-boarding: Formal onboarding accelerates the time to make the “newbie” feel a sense of belonging , and for them to contribute productively. I’ve used simple new member virtual “packets,” containing things like CoP charter, workspace or microblog sign-on instructions, meeting schedules, leader profiles, working group information, and ground rules.

8. Measure and Continuously Improve: CoP measurement has two major goals: 1.) Keeping your Sponsors on-board; and 2.) Enabling members to periodically celebrate or make course-corrections. Even while hard numbers for CoPs’ impacts on revenue and productivity are hard to come by, such formal business measures can be shown to correlate with member counts, meeting participation, people-finds, docs-shared, and focused deliverables of working groups. Anecdotes about knowledge-reuse are also useful for representing the CoP’s impact.

9. Use Technology Effectively: Before talking about technology, first some definitions: “CoPs are the human beings. Tools enable their processes and connections.” CoPs are NOT the tool. (Nothing irks me more than when someone points to the computer monitor and says, “See the CoP?”) With humans in mind, the tool(s) must be easy to integrate into life. More is not better. The CoP needs to size up the typical members’ capacity to engage with technology, and then prioritize among things like shared doc-stores, RSS feeds, Threaded Discussions, LiveMeetings, Microblogs, Social Bookmarks and Wikis.

10. Get Recognition/Give Recognition: Recognition is not only fun. It also makes sense. Community-pride and cohesion grow with recognition from the organization, and individuals’ CoP loyalty grows with authentic recognition by the CoP members. Effective CoPs I led were routinely nominated for corporate awards, and we also took meeting time to recognize members’ valuable actions, such as leading working groups, contributing discussion threads, and welcoming new members. The ten CSFs can be a good way for CoPs to do a self-assessment, and consider course corrections. More, using the CSFs to benchmarking across CoPs can lead to good learning and cross-pollenization. Here’s a sample point-in-time benchmark we used at a technology company a few years ago. (Note: “AR” represents “Action Required,” or a recommended course correction.)

Where from Here?

Sustainable CoPs who practice the CSFs are those where members get value. Specifically, members…

Come together around a goal that they’re passionate about;
Think across functional or divisional or organizational silos;
Test ideas in safety, and grow a sense of trust through a shared track record of debates, explorations, and truth-tellings;
Experience collaboration without hierarchy or judgment;
Serve as a powerful, cross-organizational voting block for topics that don't have natural support from silo-owners; and
Tap into a network of supportive problem-solvers.

When members’ feel their CoP participation is worthwhile -- when they share a “faith” -- the CoP can also grow into a business-critical corporate asset. Productive relationships result in outcomes like smarter selling, faster delivery times, faster integration of new employees or new (acquired) businesses, and greater safety. CoPs are not for the faint of heart. I’m the first to admit that working the ten CSFs can be challenging. But the rewards are tremendous.

About the Author:

Katrina (Kate) Pugh is president of AlignConsulting, which does business planning and knowledge-based transformation, using CoPs and other strategies. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Manager Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Kate has 16 years of consulting and seven years of industry experience in the IT, healthcare, energy, and financial services sectors. Kate held leadership positions with PwC/IBM, Fidelity, JPMorgan, and Intel Corporation. Kate has an MS/MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, has a BA in Economics from Williams College, and has certificates in facilitation, project management, mediation, and LEAN Six Sigma Blackbelt. Kate has published articles or led workshops on sharing tacit knowledge in Harvard Business Review, NASA Ask Magazine, European American Business Journal, SI KM Leaders, Center for Business Intelligence, and KM Forum.

IBM Named Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Platforms Software

David A Brooks — Wed, 7 Jul 2010 22:31:22 -0400

As quoted in an IBM Press release, "IDC ranked IBM as the worldwide marketshare leader in the Social Platform market based on total software revenue for 2009 (1)."

Read Write Web Unconference - Enterprise session

Suzanne Livingston — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:20:06 -0400

I was honored to speak at the Read Write Web summit in NYC last Friday regarding Real Time in the Enterprise. The talk was a quick one, but it was important to me, as it was just before everyone decided what topics to spend the day discussing at the unconference. I wanted to broaden the conversation of the real - time web to include enterprises, businesses, organizations and governments. I shared a few customer stories and why I felt it was important to consider the enterprise. Afterward, the room contributed their thoughts on discussion topics for real time, and several great topics were suggested. Enterprise Microblogging, Privacy, Social Commerce and more.

Photo courtesy Alex Williams - see more pics here

Here is a video of the opening session. Marshall Kirkpatrick kicked things off with a great discussion on the impact of the real time web. I followed up with a short talk on real time enterprise (I'm at about 33 min in). Then afterward, the unconference topic facilitation began. SInce they are hard to see in the video, I included my slides in at the bottom.

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit on Justin.tv

Read Write Web Unconference NYC

View more presentations from Suzanne Livingston.

New white paper available: Measuring the value of social software

Suzanne Livingston — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:31:35 -0400

A new white paper from IBM Software Services for Lotus on social software is now available.

The "Measuring the Value of Social Software" white paper focuses on helping organizations answer the question:

How can we determine if our social software initiatives are successful and are providing the anticipated return on technology investment?

This white paper looks at how to measure the effectiveness and value of a social software initiative, what tools are available to capture key metrics, and what to take into consideration when establishing a measurement approach.

Contents

Why measure?
Defining objectives
Types of measurement
Measurement levels
Measurement tools
Sample reports
Creating a measurement approach

Authors:

Chris Cooper (Collaboration and Social Software Consultant - IBM Software Services for Lotus)
Mike Martin (Senior Managing Consultant - IBM Software Services for Lotus)
Terry Kiernan (Offerings Specialist - IBM Software Services for Lotus)

Download the white paper

Check out the new translation technology in the product wikis!

Suzanne Livingston — Wed, 19 May 2010 10:04:37 -0400

	The power of crowd-sourced translation in Lotus product wikis
Overview	A new machine translation service, called n.Fluent, is now enabled in the Lotus product wikis. This tool translates text and if you see any errors or areas for improvement, lets you suggest changes to enhance the quality and readability of the translation.
Details	Using n.Fluent, wiki users can choose to refine translated sentences or words for greater accuracy. The tool actually "learns from its mistakes" and improves translation accuracy over time based on the corrections you provide. n.Fluent embodies the spirit of the wikis, enabling the community to actively improve the translation of the information. Visit the external n.Fluent site at: http://www.research.ibm.com/social/projects_nfluent.html. Note: This new machine translation service works on all content in the Lotus product wikis. We continue to have our product documentation translated by our translation centers and published separately for reference.
Try it	To see n.Fluent in action: 1. Visit any of our Lotus product wikis, for example the Lotus Connections Wiki , and look for the n.Fluent translation tool in the left navigation: 2. Select the language you'd like to use, and n.Fluent translates the current page. 3. As you browse to other pages in the wiki, they are automatically translated into the chosen language. 4. To contribute a modified translation, hover over the text that you'd like to modify. A window opens, giving you the chance to suggest a better translation: 5. Type your suggestion and click Submit. 6. Your translation displays in italics on the page. This suggestion is then contributed back to the n.Fluent server, where it becomes part of the stored translation and is used to improve the accuracy of other translated content.

Community Mail Design ideas

Joseph Russo — Sat, 3 Apr 2010 11:34:30 -0400

Mailing a Community

Today in Connections Communities, there's this button “Mail Community” that let's someone send a direct email to people in the community

and it has a few aspects to it, that you may or may not be aware of ... and why they are there...

First, the link about using your favorite email client. This is merely the “mailto” type feature, that will pop up the user's current default email client with the list of the community members (or just owners, if that radio is selected). Our motivation for supporting this feature is to let you use the email client you prefer, and allows you to easily incorporate all aspects of email (like rich text, attachments, etc) in a place you're familiar with. However, there's a drawback. Since “mailto” is a URL, it has some specfic limitations, primarily that in IE they impose a maximum limit of just over 2000 characters. So with this limitation, using the mailto for a community of 200 members for example, where each member's email is on average 10 characters..well, we hit that limt...so, mailto is less than optimal.

Second, there's a “To:” link, which, if clicked pops the entire membership into a text area. This design is intended to let someone easily perform an old fashioned copy/paste and and use that list of emails as desired (like pasting into their email client).

Ok, that being said, there is a different UI experience in connections for things like notifications...where we've adopted a UI that presents a list of people, by display name, with checkboxes alongside, as shown below;

Now with this design, someone can select all or select a subset...and can also use a filter to whittle down the list of names. This interface has a couple of advantages, first being that we show the list as human readable display names (and not the potentially crypitc email addresses)...and for those of you who worry about email security, as in, please don't show my email to others, this approach provides a blind so that someone can email without knowing the recipients actual email address. Finally, one big advantage is that this is the standard connection interace for notifications by email.

So now the question is, should we drop the community mail design in favor of the more standard connections notification pattern? Also, as part of this question, I'd love to hear from you all about what, if any features from the community email form you make use of...like mailto link or expanding the To field, etc...

Finally, here's a mock up of something we could do with the community mail form if we decide to adopt the standard notification pattern;

BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections & Lotus Quickr

Suzanne Livingston — Thu, 1 Apr 2010 11:09:13 -0400

IBM Social Software

The BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections offers enterprise social networking capabilities for people-based collaboration by extending Lotus Connections Profiles, Activities, Blogs, Communities, and Bookmarks to BlackBerry smartphone users, and helps them access the information and expertise needed to remain productive while on the go. The BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Quickr establishes a framework for document-based collaboration, extending Libraries, Folders, and Files to BlackBerry smartphone users and give on-the-move employees the ability to quickly share critical documents from the BlackBerry smartphone.

Learn more about the Connections client here and the Quickr client here.

How does the Spanish Red Cross apply Community Management to its Social Network?

Suzanne Livingston — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:57:50 -0400

The Spanish Red Cross’s slogan is “Cada vez más cerca de las personas” or translated into English “increasingly close to people”, in my opinion one of the many slogans out there that really match the philosophy behind Social Networks, connecting people with people. This is the main reason why the Spanish Red Cross has implemented a Social Network as Lotus Connections, to connect its members, partners and volunteers all together in order to reach and collaborate with more people through social software.

Thanks to this shift, a new role has emerged inside the Spanish Red Cross: the Community Manager (CM from now on). Our first step was to define clearly the role and we came up with a definition as the following:

A Community Manager is a person who is in charge of managing a virtual community in a social software environment, he/she can manage one or more communities at the same time being his role strongly linked to the people that make up the Community and his/her main goal to keep them alive and make them progress adequately.

Bearing in mind this definition we also came up with 5 basic tasks he/she should never forget and that should be applied at all times:

1. Listen to his users by reading their blogs, forums, wikis, etc. to discover positive and negative trends. Always available to reinforce the community’s security
2. Share and Comment appropriately and precisely. A CM is the voice of the organization in the virtual environment and must possess and use its common sense correctly. He/she must , expressing the organizations’ opinion and must always be committed to it.
3. Report and connect from and to the organization, forwarding the information and needs received from the Community members to the necessary departments inside the organization and vice versa. Acts as a “key stone” between both worlds.
4. Feedback. This is the key to a good long term relationship with the community users. If their suggestions are heard by the CM and they can see a trace of work being carried out triggered by their suggestions (thanks to the feedback received), they will feel a strong sensation of belonging to the Community. Also the CM has to give feedback from the members to the organization so it understands what is going on outside its corporate firewall.
5. Motivate, energize and innovate inside his Community. Innovation is key because a Community is evolving constantly and the Innovation will come from the motivation and energy the Community has; it’s the contribution of new ideas what drives people to do things differently. The success of a Community also depends on its energy degree that can be built using motivation strategies and techniques; in the end what a CM should try to do is make every single member feel part of the Community, a team member so they keep coming, sharing and collaborating.

Calling those with first hand experiences selecting, prototyping, integrating, and managing IBM products!

Suzanne O Minassian-Livingston — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:53:34 -0400

Calling all people with first hand experiences selecting, prototyping, integrating, and managing IBM products! We're trying to make our products more cohesive, consistent and easy to integrate in your environment, and we need your help in completing a survey. Your answers will be provide to our development teams to alleviate the problem. The survey can be done on any IBM product, but obviously we would love your feedback on Lotus products!

The survey will take anywhere between 20-30 minutes to complete, and it must be completed in a single browser session (you can't save a partial survey). We know this is a large chunk of your time, but we really do appreciate you participating and offering us your experiences.

To complete this survey, please go to:
https://www.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/studies/consumabilitywebform.htm?icode=blog_synchronous

If you need to enter a code, please enter blog_synchronous. Thanks again!

Special offer on our book, IBM Lotus Connections 2.5: Planning and Implementing Social Software for Your Enterprise

Suzanne O Minassian-Livingston — Thu, 4 Feb 2010 08:46:14 -0400

IBM Lotus Connections 2.5: Planning and Implementing Social Software for Your Enterprise

If you haven't purchased our new book yet, you can take advantage of a special offer from the publisher. The book covers many aspects of working with Lotus Connections 2.5, including business considerations (authored by one of our top adoption experts at IBM!), technical considerations, extending Connections, and using it. Here's the official book description and a information on how to get the special offer:

In this book, a team of IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 experts thoroughly introduces the newest product and covers every facet of planning, deploying, and using it successfully. The authors cover business and technical issues and present IBM’s proven, best-practices methodology for successful implementation. The authors begin by helping managers and technical professionals identify opportunities to use social networking for competitive advantage–and by explaining how Lotus Connections 2.5 places full-fledged social networking tools at their fingertips. IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 carefully describes each component of the product–including profiles, activities, blogs, communities, easy social bookmarking, personal home pages, and more. The book contains practical coverage of administering Lotus Connections 2.5 and detailed guidance of integrating and extending Lotus Connections 2.5.

Save 35% by Purchasing Directly from IBM Press!
“IBM Lotus Connections 2.5: Planning and Implementing Social Software for Your Enterprise”, authored by Stephen Hardison, David Byrd, Gary Wood, Tim Speed, Michael Martin, Suzanne Livingston, Jason Moore and Morten Kristiansen
Visit: www.ibmpressbooks.com/title/0137000537
Enter the following code at Checkout (Step #3): IBM0531 (Case sensitive)
[Discount is valid for purchase of the book, whether as stand-alone or part of the Book + eBook bundle]
[Free Shipping for customers within the U.S.]

Community Landing Page Experience

Joseph Russo — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 10:34:48 -0400

Today, in communities, the "landing page" for the service brings the user to the Public Communities list view...and additionally, they can click to see the My Communities list view...

After hearing lots of feedback and comments from customers, I've been thinking about how to redesign this experience and it seems to fall into these categories;

1. New user

When a new user, someone who's not joined any or just a small # (3 or less, or some other reasonable small #) it probably makes sense to give them these default views, first Public and then My...though we could improve this slightly with the addition that When a user is logged in, the default view is indeed My Communities

2. Not so new user

We'd figure this out by something clever, but regardless, in this case, I've been trying to think of why this person would come to the communities page...and I have a few scenarios

a. they want to search or otherwise find a community - so we need to make searching and tag filtering front and center
b. they would love to see a roll up of things that have gone on in their communities, so that they get info at a glance that would help them decide to look further, or not. Today we just have this My Communities page that lists by most recent update

3. Passionate Contributor

This is someone who's interested in one or more topics, in the community (or communities) – they want to get a pulse for what is going on, detailed pulse, in the places they are passionate about. And of course, they especially want to see things going on around contributions they've made.

4. Owners

They need to maintain and manage, as well as encourage their communities. They also want to know how well they are reaching their audience, how well they are serving their members...and they want to seek out new members, find more people that would be interested in their community.

5. Expert advice seeker

This person needs to get content and find people who have useful information around some topic or area this person is seeking.

For each of us, we probably fall into more that one of these categories and I believe that we can do a service to each of these categories with the right kind of landing page experience and actions.

Let's look at the needs in bullet form:

Newbie

1. list of communities (public ones)
2. abstract info (tags, description, perhaps size) about the community
3. what is hot – where is there a lot of action going on
4. needs to be easy/obvious on how to engage – not just being able to join easily but engage (like respond to a forum topic)
5. what is here that pertains to me, what is here that I care about

So this means we need to emphasize;

Public communities – not my communities
Community business card on hover to give feel for how this all works
better detail in list views;
a. logo (mini logo)
b. title
c. description

Encourage people to join from this UI
using the work of SaND (things related to me in some way) emphasize those communities
What is my network doing here – or people in my org, show me those communities

Not so new user

Emphasize
Communities I am a member of
Communities I am following
What my network is doing
what's hot/what's going on in these communities
Doesn't want to see so much detail (meta data, desc, tags) about these communities, but rather, show me the latest action (like last 3 things that happened – of interest, not member junk so much (unless it's someone in my network), show me things like forum/files/activity/wiki actions

Passionate Contributor

So similar to the Not so new user, but the top most things need to be around the stuff I am very interested in...so maybe we need to emphasize the forum topics you've created and has been responded to, or files you've added, and not so much the communities per-se – the list views here may be better served to show content and action on that content, and secondarily show you which communities these came from

Owners

Top most stuff...the communities I own
What's been happening, maybe more emphasis on the amount of stuff that's gone on recently
Also, are there any pressing actions I need to take (like respond to requests to join? Flagged content? Moderation duties?)

Seeker

Give me a search query and result roll up that let's me see relevant content, relevant people and relevant communities, each area and of course, the intersection of these three areas...allow me to learn as much as I can here and then, let me dive into an area (pivot) when it seems like it may be well suited to my needs

Let's look at some simple page layouts that meet these needs

For the newbie, we see the list of Public Communities and each community in the list shows the logo, (in a large size), the community name, description and tags, and then if there are any people in the community this person knows...as well as showing any actions they can take (like join).

Also we show recommended communities and what the people in the newbie's network are doing here in the community space.

For the Not so new user and the Passionate contributor, we have;

Here these users would land on “My Communities”, and instead of seeing an reiteration of the description, etc for each community they instead would see a few of the most recent things that happened in the community. Also, we show a smaller logo, they just need to identify the community, the logo can be less prominent here. They could even hover over one of these action links to see a little more in this view so they could decide to jump into the community to investigate more. Also, this list of most recent would be weighted to show responses to any particular content that was contributed by the user viewing, (i.e., I would see responses to things I said or did in the community).

Now, for owners, we have;

Here, owners would see My Communities view too..and would have a filter to show, “Communities I own” - now, we can't default to this view on landing, BUT, we could do something like save that filter setting (“show just communities I own”) so that when I revisit this page, it remembers that I have that filter checked.

The thing here is we also use the condensed view of the community with smaller logo and just title. Like the previous UI, we show the 3 most recent actions (and weighted to this particular user) – but we also add in two other things. First, some statistics, about membership changes, content contribution and view count. We also let them know if there any outstanding actions they need to address, like membership requests or things like content moderation, or whatever.

Finally, the “seeker” needs to see results for their query, but, we should also wrap that in the same kind of experience where they can discover more...

Here we see a list of results for this query, and we also see the community related to the result (where the user can click to go to the community OR hover to get the community business card to pop) and also the relevant people, with their business cards available as well.

So, now it's your turn. I'd love to hear what you think about this kind of landing page experience for communities.

Getting ready for the Lotusphere 2010 Opening General Session

Suzanne O Minassian-Livingston — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:46:15 -0400

For a third year in a row, I have the privilege of working in the Lotusphere Opening General Session demo team with demo guru Ron Sebastian, master conductor Heidi Votaw-Ambler, and a rockstar team. Chris Reckling is documenting our progress, as usual, in his blog here. It's hard to believe we're only a few days away!

Customizing IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 with Lotus Widget Factory and Google gadgets

David A Brooks — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:30:00 -0400

Want to learn how to create widgets for Lotus Connections without having a deep knowledge of Web development? This article by Vincent Burckhardt explains, with concrete examples, how to use Lotus Widget Factory as a development tool to create real world widgets. The article also outlines how to leverage the catalog of Google Gadgets to extend Lotus Connections. Enjoy.

Vincent Burckhardt is a Software Engineer at the IBM Dublin Software Laboratory. Vincent has been working as part of the IBM Lotus Connections development team since 2007.

Lotusphere awaits

Joseph Russo — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 16:01:27 -0400

Hey I just wanted to put a plug in...I will be going to Lotusphere this year, I'll be pulling shifts in the UX Lab, where we'll be talking about possible design choices for COnnections going forward, this is your chance to help guide the design, so please, by all means, stop by, say hi, and let's chew over designs.

Also, I'm going to be giving a presentation on Lotus Connections, along with Bill Looby, we'll be talking about customization across the entire product, touching things end users can do to customize Lotus Connections and touching on a scant few of the many many ways developers can customize and extend Lotus Connections. It's under the development track AD301.

See you there!

Detailed guide on setting up Lotus Connections in a network deployment.

David A Brooks — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 00:22:04 -0400

On the Lotus Connections Wiki, the IBM system verification team has provided some sample deployment scenarios for Lotus Connections. These deployment scenarios are based on actual environments configured during the product testing phase. They include common combinations of software products that have been tested and reviewed.

If your looking to setup Lotus Connections in a clustered environment, these are great step by step reference guides with many details around tuning, ssl, sso, and many other important steps for a successful deployment - outlined in an easy to follow guide.

Lotusphere is coming fast!

Suzanne O Minassian-Livingston — Wed, 6 Jan 2010 07:55:21 -0400

:: Abstract not available ::

Glue for Lotus Connections

Suzanne O Livingston — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:42:25 -0400

I love how many cool clients have been developed for Lotus Connections status updates! Here's a new one I recently came across and decided to give a try. Glue for Lotus Connections is an Adobe Air client that allows you to update your status, view status updates and responses from across your network and your organization. They have a unique feature as well that allows you to view and download Connections Files - very handy!

--------------------
From the Glue team (follow them @connectionsglue):

The team behind Glue consists of a few independent developers that are in love with social networking and building things. We have been in and around Lotus products for much of our careers and we originally heard about Connections on the blogosphere.

After using Connections on the Greenhouse we found ourselves wanting more capabilities. We began wondering if there were better ways to microblog within the tool. Being avid users of the TweetDeck application for Twitter, we decided to tackle the challenge of creating a robust cross platform application for Connections that would help organizations stay connected.

Glue makes it easier to microblog within Connections
Glue makes it easier to search profiles on Connections
Glue makes it easier to browse Files on Connections
Glue will soon integrate with Twitter (beginning of 2010)
and.. Glue will continue to grow

When creating Glue we kept the user experience at the forefront of the design. Our goal was to build Glue to make it easier for employees to leverage the power of Connections. We have found that Glue's users are actively more engaged in Connections than others.

We welcome all feedback and we encourage you to join the dozens of organizations that are trying out Glue today.

Jeff is the President of Glue, LTD.

Stephanie is the Lead Product Engineer

Developing Software "Socially"

Suzanne O Livingston — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:34:18 -0400

Awhile back we gave you a link to a video describing Mainsoft's integration efforts of Lotus Connections and Rational Team Concert. Well, not too long ago, more information was released in InfoWorld, CMSWire, Search Software Quality, and more regarding Mainsoft's press release on the topic. One of the benefits of this type of integration is the context it provides for engineers and for project stakeholders. For example, during my development experience, I can recall a number of occasions where a system requirement would come across my desk and I would ask myself where the issue came from or why it was important or how the end user will ultimately leverage the requirement. This type of integration connects the individual tasks and line items required to complete a project with the stakeholders who are depending on their completion, allowing engineers to publish a work item to a community or activity to solicit feedback and interact with request owners or even end users. It goes beyond that as well, providing a means for engineers to interact with each other as well. If you are interested in learning more, you can download the Mainsoft technology preview from their site here.