Sogeti Becomes a Social Business with IBM Social Software

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Sogeti exemplifies one of the superb success stories of becoming a Social Business. You may remember that I talked about Sogeti last year as they went into production picking IBM Social Software over Microsoft SharePoint as their Enterprise 2.0 platform. Sogeti became a fully networked enterprise (to borrow the keyword from McKinsey) and achieved real business value from it.

For those who don't know, Sogeti is a wholly owned subsidiary of Capgemini. They employ 20,000 people in 15 countries and over 400 locations. Therefore, collaboration is mission critical for Sogeti.

Erik van Ommeren, Director of Innovation at Sogeti, talks about their choice of social business platform and why they chose IBM's social software platform in the following video. I found it interesting that when Eric was pitching this to senior management he chose to show them a sample of the microblogging activity that was occurring in the system. Senior management loved the transparency it created and how easy it was for them to get a pulse as to what was going on throughout the organization.

Sogeti got so much value from using Lotus Connections internally that they have now built a business around IBM's social business platform to help their customers, in turn, become a Social Business.

To learn more about Sogeti's social collaboration platform, what they call TeamPark, click here.

McKinsey Finds "Networked Enterprises" Outperform Others

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McKinsey & Co released last week results of new research that shows that companies that use Web 2.0 intensively gain greater market share and higher margins. McKinsey is prominently highlighting this new study in their homepage (as shown below).

McKinsey uses the term "networked enterprises" (what others are calling a Social Business) to describe companies that are using Web 2.0 technologies either internally, externally, or both.

Along with the study, McKinsey also published a 5 minute podcast with researcher Michael Chui where he explains his findings. Some of the results that really caught my attention were that McKinsey found that "networked enterprises" have:

• achieved significantly higher market share than their competitors
• achieved higher operating margins
• become known as market leaders

McKinsey has been doing this study for the past four years and they say that this is the first time that they've seen a correlation between the use of web 2.0 technologies and corporate metrics like higher market share and higher margins.

So, are you a networked enterprise yet? If not, what are you waiting for?

To listen to the podcast and read the study, go here.

Need Your Feedback: How Easy is Lotus Connections 3.0 ?

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Happy Friday! Remember how back in October I asked for your feedback on what to look for in Lotus Connections Next? Well, now the Lotus User Experience Research team is looking to evaluate the ease of use of Lotus Connections 3.0 on Lotus Greenhouse, and would like your feedback! Please take a few minutes to complete three Lotus Connections tasks on the following website and provide us with input for future improvements to the product. To participate, please visit the following URL, and follow the instructions on the screen.

https://s.userzoom.com/m/MSBDOVM0MzM_

Note: Please remember to use your Lotus Greenhouse account to log into Lotus Connections. If you don't have it, you can easily join Lotus Greenhouse here https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/login.jsp

Feel free to forward this invitation to any other people who may be interested in participating. We will close the study by December 31th. If you have any questions/comments about the study, feel free to send an email to yangmeng@us.ibm.com. Also, if you would like to sign up as a volunteer for future IBM user experience studies, you can do so here.

Thanks in advance for your help!

My Experience Installing Lotus Connections 3.0 for the First Time

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Yup. Believe it or not, yesterday was the first time I installed Lotus Connections 3.0. While I had the beta 1 and beta 2 code I never had the time to sit down and install it in my own image. In between my job role change, the new baby, planning two product launches and Lotusphere, it's been a crazy second half.

Things seem to be settling down and I'm getting used to my new workload. I did the install as I'm helping prepare a new super awesome demo environment with Quickr, Cognos, Sharepoint, Sametime, and Connections all integrated together ( I will soon release more details on it once it's ready).

I was pleasantly surprised with all the improvements that have been done in the installer of this new version. The install took about 6 hours to get everything up and running. A couple of notes:

• I did this on a VMWare so in real hardware this time would definitely be less.
• I also did this sequentially. If you did it all in parallel it would be ~3 hours.
• Most of the time was spent just watching progress bars since the installation has been streamlined where I just click Next, Next, Next, Next, and so on.

Here's what I installed (and how long each step took me):

• WebSphere 7 + fixpacks (~1.25 hrs)
• TDI v7 + fixpacks (~30 mins)
• DB 9.7 (~30 mins)
• IBM HTTP Server v7 + fixpacks (~15 mins)
• Lotus Connections v3.0 (~1.5 hrs)
• Post-installation steps (~1.5 hrs)

To help me along, I followed the step-by-step instructions with screenshots provided in the wiki here. Those instructions were definitely key in helping me move along so fast. One of the things that I always like in documentation is screenshots and that document definitely fits the bill. I'm assuming that anyone who's doing a Show-N-Tell session at Lotusphere 2011 on how to install Connections will be able to just rip off the screenshots from there!

Anyway, congrats to the development team and the documentation for all the improvements that have been made in this area.

IBM's Luis Suarez Awarded Internal Social Software Evangelist of the Year

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For those of you who may have missed the news, last month at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA, IBM's Luis Suarez received the award for 2010's Internal Evangelist of the Year. I thought this was huge!!

The award is sponsored by the 2.0 Adoption Council which is part of the Dachis Group. It turns out that Luis was actually on vacation when the award was announced by Claire Flanagan. In fact, check out how Luis "accepted" his award in this photo from Alex Dunne.

For those of us who couldn't attend the conference, Claire shared the text of the speech she used to announce the winner of this year's prestigious award.

After I heard the news, I wanted to get on Luis' calendar and get his take on the award. It turns out that the This Week In Lotus podcast team beat me to it. Their December 3rd episode (Episode 29) is a must-listen as you'll hear Luis Suarez talk about social software evangelism and why it's needed. Susan Scrupski, who created the 2.0 Adoption Council, is also part of the podcast. You'll also hear my voice in parts of the podcast (you really can't tell, but I had tons of technical issues that day... Stuart McIntyre did a good job of editing that stuff out, but I digress).

I finally had a chance to "sit down" with Luis yesterday and here's what came out:

Congratulations again to Luis on this awesome award!

Software Development is Best when It's Social!

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Last year, IBM announced integration of Lotus Connections with Rational's software development suite, and you can see it at work here:

Making the software development process social is just something that every organization must do and of course follows our social everywhere strategy. Imagine empowering all your software developers and getting them access to your customers, business partners, marketing, research, etc all from the context of their work. That's a sure step towards becoming an agile organization!

Recently, I was reading John Waters' blog and he emphasized how much he likes this integration. On Thursday @ 11am ET (8am PT), IBM will be hosting a free webcast targeted for organizations involved in software development:

To meet tough deadlines and improve quality, software developers obviously need to collaborate with each other. However, they also need to leverage the expertise from a wider community of users, partners and other stakeholders during development.

By combining social software into the Rational Team Concert environment, developers gain instant access to the experts they need, get issues resolved faster and receive feedback from communities to help ensure that projects meet their intended goals. Attend this webcast to see how new capabilities expedite the development process.

You can sign up and register here.

3M Goes Social and Viral

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As I was catching up on the news over the weekend, I came onto this one that I thought was very cool!

Inspired by the Shorewood Lib Dub video (with over 1.4 million views), back in October 3M employees (3Mers) from all over the world published a video they created on their own time. The video spread virally internally and it was posted to YouTube yesterday.

What's really cool about this is that 3M, well, let me quote them:

We relied on internal social media tools, specifically Lotus Connections and an internally-developed video sharing tool called 3M DIY Video Library. Connections’ Communities allowed for private discussion and debate. Connections’ Wiki managed group documents for project plans, team pages, storyboards and music strategy. There was a private community blog for announcements, status updates and weekly newsletters. Teams uploaded drafts of their video segments for comment (and praise) from the other teams to the video library.

Most of the employees in the video had never created a video and had never used Connections in the past. They all did this on their spare time, sometimes over holidays or vacation. Here's the video that has delighted 3M employees and executives:

I also liked how they recruited volunteers, they sent an anonymous invitation with as little information as possible: "Will you join us?". 75 employees from US, Poland, Russia, Italy, Dubai, Singapore and other countries accepted. Most employees didn't know each other, have never met, and probably never will. Isn't that awesome!!??!! (Note: I was also happy that Puerto Rico was represented in the video :) )

Congratulations to the 3M team!

To read more about this project and see the whole story behind this, see this post.

Lotusphere 2011 Sessions Announced

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Notifications on whether presentations have been accepted or not have started to go out. Congratulations to all of those who were selected. I'm not sure how many sessions were submitted and of those were accepted, but I'm really happy with how the schedule came out. In part because it seems like at Lotusphere 2011 everything is going to be about social and becoming a Social Business.

Whether you are attending or speaking, make sure you let the world know by registering on the Lotusphere page at Lanyrd. You can also add your photos, videos, and live blogs to that site so that we can all easily track it, plus everyone gets to know how cool Lotus is.

Still not convinced about going? If so, check out this video to pump you up!

or this one (depending on how much time you have with your boss in the elevator):

See you there!

Social Software and Internal Communications - A Perfect Match!

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It recently came to my attention an article that was posted on how IBM Internal communications at shifting from creation to curation. The article describes how IBM employees have adopted social software inside the firewall (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, file-sharing, etc) and overwhelm the content created by the professional communicators.

As you may know, IBM has taken a de-centralized approach for participation in external social media. That's why you don't see a single @IBM account over at Twitter, instead there are thousands of employees tweeting on IBM's behalf and driving the conversations. As mentioned in the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, this model is not about mass communications, but rather masses of communicators. And this model works according to this article from the Social Media Examiner.

This de-centralized model is also used inside the firewall. IBM's internal communications staff leverages the content produced in IBM's internal social software platform (which happens to be Lotus Connections). And this has brought the company closer together -- more connected. Metrics show that general articles intended for companywide consumption get little traffic because they lack relevance. And who knows what's relevant? The employees, of course. That's one reason traffic is up on IBM's intranet thanks to all the employee-created content.

Here's a video that shows IBM's Vice President of Digital Strategy and Development, Ben Edwards, on this topic. I did find it interesting that they showcase the majority of intranets as putting people last... the anti-social intranet, if you will:

Hear more from Ben Edwards on IBM's intranet and the role of content curation.

So if you manage your company's intranet, have you thought of socializing it to drive more traffic to it? As I work with various customers in all types of industries, I hear often that they've spent a lot of money in building an intranet, but are having tons of challenges getting employees to visit the intranet. CEMEX, for example, had that problem and they recently decided to socialize their intranet and provoke a shift in their employee culture.

When I talk to customers I also hear that the concept of socializing the intranet, however, often brings a fear to the internal communicators of losing control... or even losing importance. As a person who manages the intranet, you may fear your job becomes less important, less significant. I like and agree how Ben Edwards think it's the contrary. Your job shifts into becoming the adviser to others, the go-to SME (subject matter expert). You also become a sort of museum curator where you pick the best of the best. And this is huge, because employees could be overwhelmed with all the content that's being created. The internal communications professional can curate the content and pick the content that would be most relevant to others, thereby significantly adding value to the intranet.

Do you agree?

New Lotus Connections 3.0 Plugins Are Now Available

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For all of you celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Personally, I ate a lot of stuffing, turkey, and pumpkin pie/flan (though the pie was my favorite). My two year old woke up on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and the first thing he asked for each day was turkey. And he didn't even want it reheated. It had to be cold. Check out the picture here.

This week I'm in Littleton, MA getting to know the new team and working on the planning for next year's stuff. I'm excited to be here and even see some of my past teammates when I used to be a developer.

Anyway, I wanted to make you aware of the new plugins that are now freely available from our App Catalog for download:

• Widget for Microsoft SharePoint - Bring the capabilities of SharePoint directly into a community hosted by Connections. The plugin allows you to upload/download/check-in/check-out files to/from SharePoint without leaving the Connections interface.
  
• Plugin for Microsoft SharePoint - Expose the Connections tag cloud, business card, and search capabilities directly in SharePoint. (Also remember, there's a separate plug-in for managing Connections files directly from SharePoint)
• Plug-in for Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Windows Explorer - Post a Word document directly to a blog, Create to-do's directly from Word, search Connections directly from Office, collaborate on Wikis, and more!
• Portlets for WebSphere Portal - 9 portlets to bring the Lotus Connections services into your existing portal. The portlets include: Wikis, Profiles, Bookmarks, Tag Cloud, Blogs, and more!!
• Microblogging plugin for Lotus Notes - Update your status and comment on the status of your colleagues.

There are also other plugins and widgets available, so make sure to visit the catalog often: http://catalog.lotus.com.

Lotus Connections 3.0 Available for Download

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For those of you in the U.S.A.: Happy Thanksgiving! I'm personally looking forward to eating some turkey and pumpkin pie tomorrow as well as hanging out with my family.

Lotus Connections 3.0 is now ready for download which means that I'm going to take a rest for a couple of days and let you all play with it. The documentation in the new InfoCenter format is here and here's an Installation Worksheet to make sure you have everything you need before diving in.

In case you've been off the past few days, I would also encourage you to go through my blog to catch up. Additionally, the information development team has put together an awesome page with all the consolidated resources that you might need to get started with Lotus Connections: Getting Started with Lotus Connections 3.0. There you will find:

• Getting started videos
• Reviewer's Guide
• Printable Reference Card for Mobile

Stuart McIntyre also shared a technical view of what's new in Connections 3.0:

Lotus Connections 3.0: a Technical View on What's New

View more presentations from Stuart McIntyre.

Thanks to everyone who made this happen: development, support, information development, tech sales, ISSL, business partners, beta testers, and everyone else. I'll catch up on Monday when I'll be switching gears and focusing on Lotusphere.

You can download Lotus Connections 3.0 from here. Go at it!

Are You Ready To Be a Social Business? Prove it!

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In less than 24 hours, you will be able to download Lotus Connections 3.0 (which is really our 9th release since 2007).

If you've listened to the This Week in Lotus podcast, you'll know that part of my job is to figure out how social software can meet specific needs of various industries as part of our Collaboration Agenda strategy announced earlier this year at Lotusphere 2010.

So where am I going with this? You may recall that when I first talked about the announcement of 3.0, I asked the question: Are You Ready?

To that end, and to make sure that you are ready to be transformed into a Social Business, IBM has created the Collaboration Assessment Tool. The idea is that it'll ask you several questions on your company's existing collaboration practices, strategy and capabilities. Then it will compare your answers with those from companies that have shown best-in-class performance (i.e. top performers in your same industry).

The tool is available for free and not only does it help you assess your current collaboration practices, it will hep you define the business benefits of a social software platform to help you drive new revenue opportunities. The data is based on 3rd party research conducted by the Aberdeen Group.

To take the assessment, click here.

Download Now: Files Connector for Lotus Connections 3.0

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One of the new capabilities in Lotus Connections 3.0 is the support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). CMIS is a standard API for managing files and one of the cool things about adding this support is all the free plugins out there that already work with CMIS.

Thank to the CMIS support you can now interact with the Files capability from:

• Android connector via this app (Added on 11/23/2010 7:30AM ET -- Thanks to Matt B for this new one!!)
• Microsoft SharePoint via their connector
• Firefox via this connector
• Joomla as documented here
• WordPress via this plugin

and many more as listed here. There's even a couple of iPhone applications that can do CMIS. I've tried them all and they don't seem to work. I get the impression that they have something hardcoded and that's why they don't work. But how cool would it be to have mobile access to your files if these iPhone developers could fix their apps?

Regardless, there's two desktop connectors (written on Adobe AIR) that I downloaded and tested and I'm happy to report that they do work very well with Lotus Connections.

In the following video I demonstrate both connectors and tell you which one is my favorite:

What did you think? Pretty cool, huh? The two connectors shown above were:

• CMIS Explorer - Very raw, seems to be good at validating that the CMIS API works. Download here
• CMIS Spaces - A lot prettier. Provides search, versioning, and offline support. Download here

To view the entire list of CMIS connectors, go here.

Enjoy!

Download and Install the Free Lotus Connections Learning Widget

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On Tuesday, I did a guest blog entry in the Synch.rono.us blog (you are subscribed to that blog, aren't you?). In it, I interviewed the team behind the Learning Widget for Lotus Connections. In case you haven't heard of this widget before, the Lotus Connections Learning Widget allows you to view and filter learning materials on your Home page in Lotus Connections. You can use the widget to access demos, videos, tours, online courses, and reference cards related to Lotus Connections.

I think it's a great way to distribute learning content to your end users as you plan and continue to drive adoption to your new Enterprise 2.0 platform. Here's what you'll find inside the widget:

• Demos, videos, and tours: Demos are short product simulations that show you how to complete a task in Lotus Connections. Videos and guided tours are longer product simulations that provide an overview of a Lotus Connections component, such as Using Blogs.
  
• Online courses: Online courses are self-paced e-learning courses that are comparable to material covered in an instructor-led classroom-based course, but can be taken online at your own pace. Online courses can include conceptual information, task "how to" information, and sample files for completing exercises on your own.
  
• Reference Cards: Reference cards are a printable quick deskside reference to quickly find how to perform the most common tasks in a product.

To install the widget, it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. And, as mentioned in the blog entry over at Synch.rono.us, the widget will automatically update itself to display the new Lotus Connections 3.0 content once it's available. How's that for ease of use?

Here's a quick video that shows the Learning Widget in action:

For instructions on how to download and install this widget, click here. Business partners and consultants: Make sure that you install this widget for all of your customers!

Enjoy!

SlideShare Launches Company Networks and IBM is first!

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SlideShare announced a couple of hours ago that they have launched what they call Company Networks. Reading through SlideShare's announcement, this caught my eye:

A few months ago, I met Adam Christensen of IBM Social Media and found out that there were even more IBMers on SlideShare than I had realized. Some of the most popular presentations were from IBMers

To be honest, I didn't know so many IBMers used SlideShare either. And of course, I didn't know that the most popular presentations where from IBM either! Pretty cool, huh? The challenge, of course, was figuring out a way to aggregate all this great content into a single channel.

IBM and SlideShare worked together to create a Company Network where all members of a company would share the same look-n-feel (branding), content could be curated through a single place, and the employees still get their own individual place where they can upload their content. If the company likes, it can feature it in their homepage. You can see IBM's channel here: http://www.slideshare.net/IBM or in this screenshot from TechCrunch.

(can you spot someone in the screenshot? :) )

From IBM's perspective, Adam led the way and he shares his thoughts as to the value of this program for IBM. Most notably:

For IBM, the value is clear. We are a knowledge-based B2B company that differentiates itself through the expertise of its employees. This program allows us to turn the most common activity of our thought leaders – creating and delivering presentations – into social objects with reach across the Web.

Now it's time for me to update some of my content in SlideShare and upload some of my presentations and documents. Is there anything specifically you would like to see?

Recap of Twitter Chat with infoBOOM

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Yesterday, I was invited to participate in a Twitter chat hosted by infoBOOM. In case you haven't heard, infoboom is the IBM community created for business leaders who want to share their opinions and validate strategic thinking with like-minded peers.

.

My colleague, Luis Suarez participated in this Twitter chat about a month ago. Yesterday, we talked about the latest release of Lotus Connections, what Enterprise 2.0 means to me, millenials in the enterprise, organizations that block YouTube and other social media sites, and more.

You can see the full conversation by looking at #ibmsocial or I've made it easy for you by using Storify and aggregating all the tweets in to a single place:

Or you can see it here: Twitter Chat with infoBOOM on 16-Nov-2010 in case your browser doesn't load the tweets above..

What do you think?

How To Get Push Notifications for Lotus Connections Status Updates on your iPhone

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I'm a big fan of status updates and being alerted when something around me happens. Case in point, I created a plugin that will alert you anytime one of your colleagues does something in Lotus Connections. The plugin is also available for download from our app store/catalog site. From my external social network, I also wanted to get notifications. Luckily, the Twitter client that I use, Nambu, gives me notifications every time I get a mention or a direct message.

And these solutions are great, but only when I'm at my desk. What about when I'm mobile? Well, about 3-4 months ago I discovered Boxcar. Boxcar gives you Push Notifications on your iOS device (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad). This was a great discovery because until then I would only get text messages only when someone wrote a direct message to me on Twitter. cool, because every time I was mobile I would be notified when someone re-tweeted my messages, mentioned me, favorited one of my messages, etc.

So where am I going with this? The iPhone app for Lotus Connections doesn't have push notifications yet. On the other hand, It turns out that yesterday Boxcar updated their application to support much more than just Twitter. You can now get push notifications from Google Buzz, Facebook (which the Facebook app already does, so not sure what the value is here), Twitter Lists, Google Voice, App Recommendations, and RSS/Atom Feeds. Now that I could point to any Atom feed, it was time to put it to the test.

I went on to BleedYellow (from my iPhone) and got my feed for status updates from my network (it's the feed that shows up in the bottom of the screen) and added it to the Boxcar app.

Then I got Cali to update her status and a couple of seconds later here's what I saw:

and when I unlocked:

Pretty cool, huh? This should work with any Lotus Connections server. I think, however, that the feed retrieval happens from the Boxcar servers per se (not from the mobile device). Therefore, if your Lotus Connections server is behind the firewall, I don't think the Boxcar servers will be able to retrieve the feed. You should be able to make it work with Greenhouse, ibm.com, myDevWorks, etc. Here are the feeds for those (you'll need to replace with your key):

https://www-950.ibm.com/profiles/atom/mv/theboard/entries/related.do?key=6bf09e5d-d022-4ee5-b079-ff6f61ccf619&messageTypes=status&comments=all&sortBy=lastMod&sortOrder=desc&lang=en

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/profiles/atom/mv/theboard/entries/related.do?key=cf0bf955-848f-4daa-a35f-fcddd434d9a9&messageTypes=status&comments=all&sortBy=lastMod&sortOrder=desc&lang=en

https://greenhouse.lotus.com/profiles/atom/mv/theboard/entries/related.do?key=5a428441-dcac-4278-916e-aa28d5323eca&messageTypes=status&comments=all&sortBy=lastMod&sortOrder=desc&lang=en

I do see an option, however, to have your Growl notifications pushed over to your iPhone, but I haven't been able to play with this. This could be a way to get push notifications from internal status updates.

You also don't get to see who posted the status update, but I'm playing around to see if there's another feed that provides that info. I'll let you know if I find it.

You can download Boxcar from here.

Enjoy!

Two Podcasts You Should Listen To

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I wanted to start the week by sharing two podcasts episodes that I think most of you would get value out of and will be a great way to start your week. I know I enjoyed listening to them.

First, is a podcast that comes from the myDeveloperWorks team. You may recall that last week I mentioned how Forrester named myDeveloperWorks as one of the Groundswell Award Winners. To that end, Josh Bernoff who is the Senior Vice President of Idea Development at Forrester, joins the podcasts hosts to explain why IBM was selected as the winner of the Groundswell Award. Josh also talks about how social technologies are changing business, how to use these technologies effectively and what it means to IT.

Last week, myDeveloperWorks also won an award for SMB Social Media Marketing from AMI Partners. So congratulations to the entire myDeveloperWorks team!

To download and subscribe to the myDeveloperWorks podcast, click here. You can listen to the podcast right here (it runs 11 minutes):

Another podcast that was recently released was This Week In Lotus Episode #26. With last week's news of the Lotus Connections 3.0 Launch, can you guess what the hosts talk about? The hosts are joined by two of the Lotus Connections Product Managers: Mac Guidera and Suzanne Livingston. They'll take you through some of the new features, how CEMEX and Bayer are using Lotus Connections, and our Social Everywhere strategy (which was incidentally validated by Gartner recently, where they predict that Social will be Everywhere by 2016).

You can listen to the podcast right here (it runs for about 1 hour):

Enjoy!

The Lotus Connections 3.0 Reviewer's Guide is Ready for Download

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With the impending release of Lotus Connections 3.0, there are tons of educational materials being released. Yesterday, I showed you all the new videos that have been made available. These videos are geared towards the end user and those are what they are going to see the first time they enter the platform.

Also this week, as you may have seen in the Connections Blog and Synch.rono.us, the Lotus Connections 3.0 Reviewer's Guide was released. This Reviewer's Guide provides an extensive overview of Lotus Connections 3.0 and its nine modules: Home, Profiles, Activities, Blogs, Bookmarks, Communities, Files, Forums, and Wikis. In addition, this guide explains how to extend the features and functions of Lotus Connections to your existing applications (for example Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, etc). If you ever have a question about how a particular feature works, you can find the answer here.

You can read it here, download, print, or even view it in full screen!

Lotus Connections 3 Reviewers Guide

Enjoy!

New Lotus Connections 3.0 "How To" Videos

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With Lotus Connections 3.0 almost out the door (you are counting the hours to download it, aren't you), you can be sure that the next blog posts are going to be about the release.

As you may have seen in the demo I shared on Monday, there's now a getting started wizard which will introduce users to the various capabilities of the platform. I decided to embed the video about Forums since that's one of the components that has been thoroughly updated in this release. And I even learned a new capability by watching the video (the ability to lock forums).

Here's the video:

To watch the other videos, follow these links:

Activities	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/activities/activities_demo.html
Bookmarks	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/bookmarks/bookmarks_demo.html
Blogs	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/blogs/blogs_demo.html
Files	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/files/files_demo.html
Communities	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/communities/communities_demo.html
Home Page	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/homepage/homepage_demo.html
Forums	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/forums/forums_demo.html
Wikis	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/wikis/wikis_demo.html
Profiles	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/profiles/profiles_demo.html
Search	http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/connections30/demos/search/search_demo.html

What's your favorite video?

IBM's Social Platform Powers Two Forrester Groundswell Award Winners

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Remember how I told you that CEMEX was nominated for a Forrester Groundswell Award? You may have already heard, but CEMEX was selected as a winner of a Forrester Groundswell Award in the Collaboration category. The news also spread like fire on Monday as part of the Lotus Connections 3.0 launch.

CEMEX was faced with the challenge of a globally distributed workforce, multiple languages, and multiple timezones. In the video below you'll see Gilberto García, Director of Innovation at CEMEX, talk about how they started to look at their internal culture and ask the question: "How can we change the culture of our company?"

To become more agile, CEMEX created Project Shift, where not only they deployed an internal social network, but their social collaboration platform is now their intranet!

"

I was pretty impressed by their adoption rate:

• They started with 2000 employees and has grown to over 17,000 users
• 400 communities grew organically
• In a particular community, they got over 600 community participants
• Lotus Connections was used to drive the creation of a new product and bring it to market

I also liked his last quote: "It can make a big company feel like a small company". That's definitely my feeling as I use Lotus Connections internally every day at a company with over 400,000 employees.

In the B2B Category for Supporting, Forrester named IBM the winner for its implementation of Lotus Connections over at developerWorks. My developerWorks has calculated an ROI of over $100 M in annual savings by leveraging the Lotus Connections platform as its core for supporting over 8 million users worldwide. The site currently receives 1 million visitors / month.

Live Stream - IBM's Keynote at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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Today, IBM will be on stage delivering a keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference taking place this week at Santa Clara, CA. Larry Bowden will take the stage at 10:20am PT (1:20pm ET). Larry will of course be talking about the Lotus Connections 3.0 Launch.

If you want to watch the IBM keynote and the rest of the keynotes, go to TV site for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

So mark your calendars and come back at 10:20am PT and then let me know what you thought.

Recap of the Lotus Connections 3.0 Launch

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Yesterday's announcement of Lotus Connections 3.0 was received very well. People seemed to be very excited and tons of news outlets picked up the news.

Using Storify (thanks to a recommendation from Mitch Cohen) I was able to compile some of the tweets. I want to emphasize "some"! There were tons and tons of tweets and RT's. What I've done is compiled the tweets up on the top and then links to the various news sites where the story was published down at the bottom.

This is my first time using Storify. What do you think? Very cool, huh?

Lotus Connections 3.0 Announced - Are You Ready?

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In time for today's kick-off for the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA, IBM today officially announced Lotus Connections 3.0. The announcement letter also contains the Hardware and Software Requirements so you can start planning your upgrade and/or installation of Lotus Connections 3.0.

Additionally, IBM social collaboration has a new homepage: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/socialcollaboration/ . Within this homepage, you'll find the list of What's New in Lotus Connections 3.0. You'll find a huge list of new capabilities that are coming, and I must warn you, it's not a complete list! We just didn't have space to fit all the new things that we added.

Now, if we compare that page to what the team actually promised at Lotusphere 2010, you'll see a HUGE difference. Not only did the team deliver on all of its promises, it delivered even more!

Here's a video recorded by my colleague Suzanne Livingston so you can take a peek at what's coming in an awesome demo she put together (and recorded on a Mac!):



Here's a collection of links from those who have picked up today's news:

• StreetInsider.com: IBM Social Software Improves Employee Collaboration at Bayer
• ReadWriteWeb: IBM Bakes Analytics into Lotus Connections 3.0
• ComputerWorld: CEMEX execs boost collaboration with IBM's Lotus Connections
• MarketWatch: IBM Launches New Software and Social Business Consulting Services
• Government in Action: Social Business Gains with Lotus Connections 3.0

Many of my team members are going to be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, so feel free to reach out and ask for more information.

What do you think?

IBM Software Helps Build the Chevy Volt

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Have you seen the Chevy Volt? Like it ? Here's a quick video that shows how IBM Software helped build the Chevy Volt.

In the video you'll see GM talk about their use of the Rational platform and how it was critical to the success of this car.

As you may know, I'm a pilot and I was impressed by the fact given in the video that an F35 fighter takes 6 million lines of code to run. The Chevy Volt takes 10 million lines of code!

And did you know that Rational Team Concert integrates very nicely with Lotus Connections? Social is Everywhere!

Invitación: Colaboración en las Nubes

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Están cordialmente invitados:

IBM Puerto Rico Collaboration User Group

"Drinks in the Clouds"

Cloud Computing and Collaboration Services for Business

Noviembre 4th ~ 6pm -8pm @ Pizzeria Uno's

Caparra Hills Galeria San Patricio

B-5 Tabonuco Street Guaynabo

Guest Speakers - Christian Barnes, IBM & Glidden Martinez, Activo

RSVP tebentle@us.ibm.com – Tracy Bentley Jagiello, IBM

Ven y comparte con nosotros para que aprendas de la collección de servicios de colaboración y 'social networking' que tu negocio puede usar.

La colaboración es esencial para tu negocio y simplifican y facilitan las interacciones diarias con tus clientes y colegas.

Y todo esto se puede hacer de una manera costo efectiva utilizando los sistemas que están en las nubes para minimizar costos de hardware y de administración. Además, ya el ambiente está totalmente configurado para que puedas trabajar con personas dentro y fuera de tu compañía. El ambiente es fácil de usar y está diseñado y administrado por la compañía de más experiencia dando servicios en la nube para darte paz mental.

Do You Know How To Pick Your Experts for Every Project? Lotus Knows!

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Lotus Knows I like videos and I liked this one: "Do you know how to hand pick the experts for every project ?" IBM's Enterprise 2.0 Platform knows!!

I wish it had some audio, though. Who's going to download it and add some voice over ? :-)

Enjoy!

Add it to your calendar: Quickr 8.5 for Domino Webcast on November 11

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On November 11, the Lotus Greenhouse is going to host a webcast with Miki Banatwala, our Chief Programmer of IBM Quickr for Domino.

  

Miki had previously shared a document describing what's new in IBM Lotus Quickr for Domino 8.5. This will be a great opportunity for you to hear directly from him. Come hear what's new and see this product in action!

Here are the details for the webcast:

• Call in Numbers: 800-593-7204 or 312-470-7215
• Passcode: IBM LOTUS
• Date: 11 / Nov / 2010
• Time: 12pm EDT
• Web Conference: http://www.lotuslive.com/join?schedid=3336625
• If you can't make it (or if you are reading this after November 11, 2010), the recording will be placed at: https://greenhouse.lotus.com/lotus/myquickr/lotus-greenhouse-webcast/library/

See you there!

How To Add Twitter and Facebook Like Buttons to a Domino Blog

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I recently helped a colleague add the Twitter buttons and the Facebook Like buttons to their Domino blog. I'm sharing the instructions here so other people can leverage it.

1. With your Notes client, open your blog database (e.g. edbrill.nsf)
2. Go to Advanced
3. Go to HTML Templates -> Item Templates -> Default Item
4. Look for
   
   

   <div class="entrybody"> <p><$DXItemContent$></p>

   
   
5. In between those lines add the following code ( make sure you update the two URLs ):
   
   

   <div style="float: right; width: 60px;"> <div style="margin: 0;" > <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/<$DXDocumentLink$>" data-text="<$DXSubject$>" data-count="vertical" data-via="edbrill" data-related="marybethraven">Tweet</a> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> </div> <div style="padding: 3px;"> <iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fedbrill.com%2Febrill%2Fedbrill.nsf%2Fdx%2F<$DXDocumentLink$>&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=60&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65" style="border: medium none; overflow: hidden; width: 60px; height: 65px;" allowtransparency="true"></iframe> </div> </div>

   
   
6. Save
7. Go to HTML Templates - Page Templates - Document
8. Again, look for:
   
   

   <div class="entrybody"> <p><$DXItemContent$></p>

   
   
9. In between those lines add the following code (this is to make buttons appear on individual pages and again make sure to update the URL's below) :
   
   

   <div style="float: right; width: 60px;"> <div style="margin: 0;" > <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/<$DXDocumentLink$>" data-text="<$DXSubject$>" data-count="vertical" data-via="edbrill" data-related="marybethraven">Tweet</a> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> </div> <div style="padding: 3px;"> <iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fedbrill.com%2Febrill%2Fedbrill.nsf%2Fdx%2F<$DXDocumentLink$>&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=60&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65" style="border: medium none; overflow: hidden; width: 60px; height: 65px;" allowtransparency="true"></iframe> </div> </div>

   
   
10. Save
11. Go to HTML Templates - Block Templates - HTMLTop
12. Look for this line:
    
    

    <title><$DXTitle$></title>

    
    
13. Replace it with this line (this is so that when you use the FB like button it display better.. It also helps with Google Search Engine Optimization):
    
    

    <title><$DXTitle$> - <$DXSubject$></title>

    
    
14. In that same file, look for <body>
15. Immediately, after that line, add this:
    
    

    <script language="javascript"> var toCompare = "<$DXTitle$> - "; toCompare += "<"; toCompare += "$"; toCompare += "D"; toCompare += "X"; toCompare += "S"; toCompare += "u"; toCompare += "b"; toCompare += "j"; toCompare += "e"; toCompare += "c"; toCompare += "t"; toCompare += "$"; toCompare += ">"; if (document.title == toCompare) { document.title = "<$DXTitle$>"; } </script>

    
    
16. Save

Enjoy!

Business Analytics & Insights Go Social Thanks to Cognos 10

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IBM is making everything go social these days. Yesterday, IBM released and demoed Cognos 10 to a huge audience at the Information On Demand Conference in Las Vegas.

One of the big announcements of Cognos 10 is that it is now bundled and integrated out of the box with the leading Enterprise 2.0 platform: IBM Connections. That's right, the entire Lotus Connections suite is included for free with Cognos 10! This was received by great fanfare as evidenced in the Twitter stream:

SOakleyIBM: Here's a shot of the new Lotus Connections collaboration integration. Very cool. http://ow.ly/i/4ToZ #baforum #iodgc #cognos10

pjtec: Fully integrated Lotus Connections out of the box with Cognos 10. What about non-Lotus social platforms? #cognos10 #iodgc

sharkpac: IBM #Cognos10 launch. Ships with Lotus Connections. The collaboration capabilities look VERY interesting.

jocoutuer: #iodgc #cognos10 wisdom prevails! Reuse The Lotus connections capabilities for bi groupware mode collaboration and search...

MCsomerville: Ok..this Lotus connections in #Cognos10 is exciting. Also, annotations at a cell level

dmenningervr: Ashe: Bsuiness #analytics has become a team game; will ship Lotus Connections in the #COGNOS10 box #IODGC #BAFORUM one of my faves

rwang0: Cognos10 ships w/ #lotus #connections out of the box #cognos10 #ibm #iodgc #analytics

rwang0: MyPOV: My favorite features are the BI workspaces and collaboration features with Lotus Connections #cognos10 #ibm #iodgc #analytics

Greg_Tydak: #Cognos10 - Social media intehration, seamless upgrade, up to 80% improvement in performance (for #TM1) AND iPad functionality? Sweet.

chrisprocter: Liking the collaborative/social aspects of #cognos10!

cedricdevroey: The team is impressed by the new social features in #cognos10 @Numius

As you'll see, some people had questions about what this means for non-Lotus shops. In my opinion, I don't think this matters for various reasons: 1) Lotus Connections doesn't run on Domino and does not require any Lotus specific technology at all; and 2) Lotus Connections integrates completely into the Microsoft stack. The story has also been picked up by various media channels:

• InfoWorld: IBM Boosts BI Offering with Cognos 10
• Enterprise Management: Top 10 Things You Need To Know about Cognos 10
• ReadWriteWeb: Cognos 10 and How It Represents the IBM Cloud Strategy
• IBM adds predictive analytics and social networking in Cognos 10
• IBM Unveils New Information Management and Analytics Software to Help Organizations Gain Faster Insight for Smarter Business Outcomes

Additionally, you can leverage Cognos' awesome reporting tools to visualize and measure the adoption of Lotus Connections within your enterprise. Here are some sample reports that my co-worker George Brichacek did:

Here's a quick movie-trailer-style video of the Cognos 10 release to pump you up.

Enjoy!

Need Your Help: Prioritize Key Focus Areas for Lotus Connections

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Happy Friday! With our next release of our super awesome Enterprise 2.0 platform, Lotus Connections, almost out the door, as you can guess we are already planning for next year's big release.

As we plan the release, we would love to have your feedback on which areas we need to focus. The Lotus User Research Team has put together a survey to help us understand which features are important to you and where can we improve the usability of those.

So if you can take 5 minutes before leaving for the weekend, I would appreciate that you complete the survey available here: http://tinyurl.com/ConnectionsTopTasks.

The survey will be open until Tuesday 10/26 so hurry hurry.

IBM Makes Office Productivity Suites Go Social!

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IBM has just released their latest version of Lotus Symphony, their free award-winning office productivity suite built on top of Eclipse and OpenOffice.

And Symphony even becomes social thanks to the free plugins that are available. First, there's a plugin to generate an organizational chart based on the information coming from the Profiles service.

Additionally, if you are using LotusLive Connections, there's a plugin to allow you to easily open, edit, and publish files to/from LotusLive directly from Lotus Symphony.

If you have SharePoint internally, there's a plugin for that as well! Or even better than SharePoint, if you are using Lotus Quickr, there's a plugin that lets you check-in/check-out, edit documents, upload documents, integrates with your ECM, and even works with your established workflow patterns.

Another plugin you might be interested in is the Wiki editor plugin. This plugin allows you to create documents in Lotus Connections and convert them into a Lotus Connections Wiki or Confluence Wiki. Need an offline wiki editor? This is the plugin for you!

If you are using MediaWiki, there's also a plugin for that.

If you are interested in calculating how much money you would save by dumping Microsoft Office and switching to Lotus Symphony, check out the calculator here. And if that's not enough to convince you, you could still download the social plugins from IBM for Microsoft Office.

You are convinced, right? Then go ahead and download this plug-in to batch convert all your Microsoft Office files into OpenOffice format and start enjoying the power of FREE!

Version 3 of Lotus Symphony is available Windows, Mac, SUSE Linux, RedHat, and Ubuntu and can be downloaded from here.

Getting Started with Social Media

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Are you interested in getting your feet wet with Social Media? IBM has created a page solely dedicated to educating businesses on how to get started with social media.

The Getting Started with Social Media page is aimed at IBM Business Partners and provides various guides to help partners better understand how to use this new medium, decide if and how to use it, and how to use key tools to get the most value out of it.

Here's what you will find there:

• Getting Started with Social Media - Part 1 - Education (social media, what and why?, market planning for social media)
• Getting Started with Social Media - Part 2 - How To Get Started (choosing social media, tools, measuring social media tools, success stories, etc)
  
• Guide: Twitter Basics
• Marketing Benefits for IBM Business Partners

Because this is targeted for IBM Business Partners, you do need an account with PartnerWorld. So all of you business partners that are reading this, go ahead and download these guides today.

Technorati has also picked this up and it's available here. It's encouraging to see that Technorati is asking other companies to imitate what IBM is doing:

[...] it's great to see companies being more proactive and aggressive with their social media use. Here's hoping other large corporations--and small ones--follow IBM's lead.

The author of the Technorati article, however, is not aware of all the great things that IBM is doing in the social space. Hopefully, he posts a follow up.