IBM Lotus Connections

Transcription

1 IBM Lotus Connections Positioning IBM is a very large player in enterprise software marketplace in general, and in the growing but smaller marketplace for social software. IBM has been supporting enterprise collaboration and communication products for over 20 years, with Lotus Notes and related products. 35% of the Fortune 100 are using IBM social collaboration solutions. Connections debuted in 2007 and is the fastest growing software product in IBM history. It is based on modern ideas of social technologies and IBM positions the product as social software for business, which seems like an awfully broad charter. However, Connections has a rich set of a variety of integrated components, including these: Profiles -- Users create rich profiles, including tag clouds and status updates. Home Page -- Consolidate messages and updates from across your network, including updates from other users or by following tags. Communities -- Groups, projects and interests, and containing various collaboration modules. Activities -- Status updates from people and data. Blogs -- Social media for teams and companies. Connections is very much a social software layer that can link together other tools -- like Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and other IBM and partner technologies -- into a rich and sophisticated solution for the enterprise. Wikis -- Collaborative social documents. Bookmarks -- Save and share important links. Forums -- Theme-based user forums. Files -- Save, share and update files. Connections is very much a social software layer that can link together other tools -- like WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and other IBM and partner technologies -- into a rich and sophisticated solution for the enterprise. 1

2 Scenario-Based Evaluation The Connections product team devised a very full implementation of the various scenarios. Like some others in the study, there were features in the near-term roadmap that would have made some examples a bit more seamless, but the scenarios demonstrate that Connections is a broad social platform with wide capabilities. Relative to the driving motif of this report, streaming is among the most recent innovations in Connections, and so, at times, I could clearly see work in process. The demos were based on what is going to be a Q release, so this is very up to the minute. IBM 1 - Connections Profile A word about Connections openness. Connections can be configured to be totally public (published to the web so that anyone can participate), totally closed (so only those with password access can enter), or set up in an intermediate DMZ, where some elements are public and others locked down. Some companies that want interaction with partners or customers use Connections native implementations for that, such as public communities, while others use Connections API or Atom feeds to integrate Connections functionality into their websites. Connections is configured to run on a company s computing infrastructure, and in general, users are employees of that company, or others who are granted access to the company s computing resources. As a result, a consultant working with several companies would have several different logins, and no consolidated dashboard across them, unless they are using IBM's online collaborative cloud environment, LotusLive, which gives them a single point of access to several companies. Cross-Company Scenario [Note: The Cross-Company Scenario is detailed in the Introduction of this report.] The cross-company scenario drew out a great deal of the basic functionality in Connections. A Connections profile is shown to the right. On the far right there are various widgets displaying information drawn from Connections, like who is in his network, who he reports too, and various links. Note that those people in his network share a reciprocal following relationship with him, but it is possible to have nonreciprocal following as well. The Report-to Chain is a great example of the sort of features that 2

3 are likely to be highly useful in large companies, which matches the profile of many of IBM s customers. IBM 2 - Newsfeed In the center, below her profile information, on the tab called The Board you can see activities, which is the Connections version of her stream. The most recent update is also displayed under the user s photo, as are various tags that he has used to characterize his professional interests. These are helpful for finding people based on expertise and interest. When a user navigates away from their own profile, or the profiles of others, and moves to the Home tab, they are presented with what is known as a Newsfeed, shown at right. As it says at the top, here you can view updates from content or people you are following, your colleagues, and responses to content you ve posted. This is a consolidation of actual updates and postings, as well as social gestures like another user adding you to their network. Also shown in the Newsfeed screenshot is My To-Do List, which is a handy widget to display the most urgent tasks. In this case a task that is overdue is highlighted in red. Getting into the specifics of the AdjectiveNoun cross-company scenario, one obvious way to represent the many groups involved in the Conglomerated Donuts project is to employ Connections Communities. A Connections community typically includes the tools that a group might need to collaborate on a shared project or interest, such as blogs, discussion forums, a member list, activities, home page, wikis, files, and bookmarks. The community's manager decides which components are included, and also decides if the community is open to all users or to a more selective group of people. 3

4 The IBM team created a Conglomerated Donuts community, so that people outside the AdjectiveNoun team could be invited in. IBM 3 - Commmunity Today s implementation of Communities does not have a single unified stream across all the varied community tools. At present, each tool has its own display, as you see in IBM 3, at right, with two subcommunities and a forum having been created. However, communities do have a single stream view in the Connections mobile application. In our scenario, we had envisioned different subprojects for the software contractors and another for the AdjectiveNoun team. Here is an example with two marketing projects for a project Zeus. Sucommunities allow different access controls and different tools to be used by different groups. For example, in this case, the project planning and advertising teams could be made up of different groups, and different capabilities could be integrated in each. IBM 4 - Mobile Commmunity 4

5 Connections provides pretty sophisticated views over activities, like activity outlines, allowing aggregation by topical sections. In IBM 6, below, you can see how User Feedback Items are segregated from Design Updates, and so on. To-Dos (tasks), like all other objects in the system have comment threads, and that even in the outline view all sorts of activities can be created, edited, tasks checked off, and so on. Also, tasks assigned to a user in a project like Consolidated Donuts show up on their personal to-do list, and can be synched with outside calendars, like ical or Lotus Notes. In our document-centered world, there are many instances when a file has be reviewed and approved. Below is a Connections To-Do attached to a post that also has a file -- a design update -- attached. While this nesting of to-dos in other objects seems to be needed in a world dominated by files, I wonder at the possible confusion at so many sorts of nesting. IBM 5 - To-Do IBM 6 - Activitites/To-Dos 5

6 Business Development Scenario [Note: The Business Development Scenario is detailed in the Introduction of this report.] IBM 6 - LotusLive Connections Survey The thrust of the business development scenario is to see how well the streaming application supports business development functions, like marketing and sales. The implementation of Connection To-Dos can support a task list approach to those functions, but do not specifically support a sales qualification sort of workflow. However, any enterprise interested in a close integration with more structured sales tools could use Connections API to implement it, just as IBM has integrated help desk and other tools. There is no out-of-the-box ability to roll up weekly sales results from four regional sales managers, for example, into a single sales number for the company, although that could be accomplished through the API. Much of the outreach capabilities of Connections could be based on integration with IBM s Lotus Live, an online collaboration service. LotusLive Connections provides a large subset of the Lotus Connections capabilities, as well as capabilities that make more sense in the online setting, like polls, webinars, and sharing of communities across multiple companies accounts. To the right is a LotusLive survey, based on a predefined customer satisfaction template. As a result, a LotusLive user could create surveys in this way, but they aren t integrated into LotusLive Connections directly, so a marketing person might manually import graphs or other data from a survey into Connections as a way to share the results with team members. LotusLive also includes the capability to these surveys and webinar invitations based on a managed list. LotusLive has a number of other services that complement Connections, like inotes, a lightweight , calendaring and scheduling system. I haven t investigated exactly how this LotusLive services cohabit, but my guess is that they are fairly independent, and you would have to choose to not use inotes calendar if you were using LotusLive Connections for tasks and calendaring. Similarly, there are is a Outlook integration available for Connections, which allows Outlook to act like a Connections client, at least to a certain extent. For example, it allows attaching an Outlook attachment to a Connections activity, so it serves to bridge across the larger world that are on , but not collaborating with you on Connections. 6

7 Human Resources Scenario [Note: The Human Resources Scenario is detailed in the Introduction of this report.] IBM 7 - ed Resumés IBM s Connections team suggested that the best course for the Human Resources scenario would be to model the project, once again, as a community. In this case, the HR professionals at AdjectiveNoun could announce the job opportunities both on the internal Connections solution, as well as on the company s external web site through widgets. In either case, candidates could upload resumes which would be directly placed into the private Human Resources community. Subsequently, the HR staff could follow up, schedule appointments, and so on. The screenshot at right shows such a community, where the resumes are associated with tasks that are assigned to members of the HR community to follow up. Resumes were drag-and-dropped into Connections via connectors for both Lotus Notes and Outlook. The end-to-end handling of a candidate s application would likely be handled by the application of the general use of to-dos, or alternatively a third party solution could be integrated. The LotusLive online webinar capability could be one way to conduct training of all sorts, as well. Connections profiles can be linked to external direction solutions, like LDAP and Active Directory, which provides a rich, extensible, and verified mechanism for building very elaborate profiles. For example, the company could verify is a technical staff member had actually passed a database certification, or if accounting staff were verified to use the payroll system. Connections supports sophisticated auditing of all documents and data, so that varius kinds of compliance for regulated industries is possible, like pharma, financial services, and others. 7

8 Other Services Lotus Atlas for Connections is a social network analysis tool that could help in large companies seeking to understand how different parts of the organization connect and communicate, by exposing the structure of the company s social network, where the bridges and hubs among various groups occur. This can accelerate finding expertise, for example. Connections supports integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, where Sharepoint widgets make Sharepoint documents accessible within communities. This is obviously of special interest to companies with large Sharepoint implementations, who are seeking a more social, streaming experience. Connections supports integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, where Sharepoint widgets make Sharepoint documents accessible within communities. This is obviously of special interest to companies with large Sharepoint implementations, who are seeking a more social, streaming experience. 8

9 Conclusions I came away impressed that Lotus Connections technically matches the marketing positioning very well. Connections is a large and broad collection of social collaboration capabilities, especially well-suited to large enterprises, especially those that are document-centric. IBM has a long roster of complex and rich technologies, both homegrown and from partners -- like help desk, online webinars and surveys, mobile applications, Microsoft Sharepoint, and others -- that allow a wide spectrum of configuration options, and providing a great degree of customization while maintaining the core architecture of Connections. IIBM has moved to roll out streams across the Lotus Connections application -- for example, the home page shows streams of people s status updates and content updates. However, a community-scoped news stream is only available on mobile devices at this point, and having that in the individual communities is likely to be ongoing for some time. It has become the dominant motif of collaboration and coordination in Connections. The only hiccup in this rapidly maturing capability is the way that Community widgets don t show a stream however, the streaming elements from communities show in the expected way in the user home page and the mobile clients. I believe that Connections is likely to seem less like a set of communities made up of discrete collaboration tools -- containers for forums, blogs, profiles, wikis, files, and so on -- once the roll out of streams is completed. Once all of these collaboration tools are principally experienced as elements of streams -- created in streams, read in streams, commented on and elaborated on in streams -- they will seem to be more alike than they do now. And, as another benefit of that user experience transition, the portal-like feel of communities will decrease: they won t feel like a collection of widgets displaying various sorts of information in discrete rectangles. Instead, the single unifying metaphor of streamed information, filtered and aggregated in different ways, will simplify the user experience of Connections, which is possibly a bit overwhelming to those not well acquainted with it. We can see the first parts of that transition in the version now coming to market. I came away impressed that Lotus Connections technically matches the marketing positioning very well. Connections is a large and broad collection of social collaboration I came away impressed that Lotus Connections technically matches the marketing positioning very well. Connections is a large and broad collection of social collaboration capabilities, especially well-suited to large enterprises, especially those that are document-centric. 9