My Lotusphere 2012 Schedule is Set!

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I've just finished setting up my page for Lotusphere 2012.  Just like last year, you can use that to start planning your Lotusphere trip and figure out how to reach me / find me while at Lotusphere.

At the point of this writing, we are just 18 days away from Lotusphere 2012 #ls12.  I'm actually going to get to Orlando on the 7th since I'll be taking the kids to their first trip to Disney.  My oldest has a countdown going and is very excited about the trip (as well as with all the toys he just got for Xmas).

This year, I'll be a presenter in 2 sessions, a Birds-of-Feather (BOF) session and will participate again in the Ask the Product Managers session.  Here's a quick recap of the sessions:

ID223 - IBM Connections Platform Integration
South Hemisphere I - Sunday 2:15PM - 3:15PM

BOF137 - Connections Adoption and Governance
Swan Toucan 2 - Tuesday 7:00AM - 8:00 AM

ID224 - What's Coming in Quickr Domino "Next"
North Hemisphere D - Wednesday 1:30PM - 2:30PM

ASK102 - Ask the Product Managers
Swan 5-10 - Thursday 11:15AM - 12:15PM

Getting up early on Tuesday is going to be tough but definitely worth it. The Connections adoption at #ls11 was awesome!  So start planning your schedule and hope to see you in a couple of weeks!

AppFusions Integrates IBM Connections and Atlassian's JIRA

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Earlier this week, AppFusions published a great video where they show integration of IBM Connections and Atlassian JIRA . If you are not familiar with JIRA, JIRA helps development teams connect, track bugs, defects, plan agile development and more. (I'm not sure if JIRA is an acronym or not, though)

Part of JIRA is an activity stream where you can see what's happening across the projects you belong to. As part of the integration, AppFusions has created a widget that can be deployed in the Connections home page.

Once the administrator deploys the widget and quickly configures it to connect to the JIRA backend, end-users will be able to see what's happening in JIRA directly from Connections. Actions that occur in JIRA are immediately reflected in Connections. Very cool.

Check out the quick 1 minute demo:

AppFusions will be an exhibitor at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 so make sure you stop by their booth to learn more or check out the solution in the Lotus App Catalog.

Social Scheduling Now in IBM Connections

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IBM Business Partner Intravision has created a great integration point between OnTime Group Calendar and IBM Connections. If you haven't heard or used OnTime before I suggest you check them out. They provide an awesome add on with a powerful and very slick group calendar interface.

OnTime also allows you to work with group calendars even when you are on the go by providing mobile access from your favorite mobile device.

The new integration point brings the power of OnTime Group Scheduling into communities in IBM Connections. The following video shows a demo of the integration. It shows a community being created in IBM Connections for team collaboration. One of the challenges of building a team is finding the people with the right skills at the right time. IBM Connections already makes it super easy to find people based on skills. This integration point, allows you to see someone's availability right on their Profile page within IBM Connections.

Once you have everyone in the community, you can quickly see everyone's availability today by just hovering over the names of team members, or you can even see a nice graphical representation for everyone's availability any date/time.

Finally, the Social Scheduling widget allows you to find people from various departments that are available at any given time. Very cool!!! Check out the quick video below:

This is a great example of the extensibility of IBM Connections via widgets. If you are interested in learning more about this, go to http://ontimesuite.com/ . And congratulations to the team for being nominated for a Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 award in the "Enabling Business Innovation through Social Collaboration".

Yay, I'm going to SXSW 2012 !

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Earlier this year, I asked that you go out and vote for the various sessions we had submitted. Yesterday, more sessions were announced for SXSW 2012 and I was happy to see that the proposal Suzanne Livingston and I submitted was accepted.

Our session is titled Enterprise Social Media Trends: Are We There Yet? . Here's the abstract we submitted:

Social media has gone mainstream! But it's not everywhere yet. In this session, we'll explore case studies that showcase the trends and best practices of using social media today, the ROI, and the impact on your customers, employees, and entire supply chain. We'll dive into the core capabilities of a social business and review how organizations are leveraging new capabilities to deliver bottom-line results. This session will provide a look into how businesses are utilizing social technologies to respond faster to opportunities, generate new ideas, accelerate innovation, and beat their competitors. We'll look into the technologies that enable this growing form of enterprise collaboration that is built on the new generation of information sharing. We'll close this out with five top trends and thoughts about where this is heading.

So once Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 is done, I'll come back home for a few weeks and then off to Austin.

I've been to Austin a couple of times to visit customers and the IBM offices and it's a great city. However, I've never had the opportunity to go to SXSW. Based on what I've read and heard, it's an awesome conference and I feel lucky to have the opportunity to go there and not only present, but also go to sessions put together by leaders of the mobile & social media industry.

For example, in the newly accepted sessions, I see speakers from companies like Twitter, Foursquare, Paypal, Pageonce, Popular Mechanics, etc.

If you are going to SXSW 2012, I hope to see you there!

LotusLive Connections Upgraded This Weekend

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Over this past weekend, we finalized some upgrades to LotusLive Connections, our multi-tenant IBM Connections solution in the cloud. This update adds some great new capabilities to Communities, Files, Activities, and Profiles. Here's a couple of my new favorite features:

• Community business owner can give ownership to another person
• Community file folders for communities that you belong to are now shown under 'Folders shared with Me'
• Easily link to Files from Activities
• Parity with IBM Connections Files (which means, for example, new drag-n-drop capabilities!)
• Instant messaging presence information in the business card
• Limit scope of a community to an organization only
• ProjExec has been integrated into LotusLive. ProjExec Live enables project managers to create, plan, execute and track projects using a professional Gantt editor that synchronizes with Microsoft Project. Invite other LotusLive users as project members and collaborate securely using a multi-project activity stream called the Project Wall. ProjExec Live is an intuitive, mobile-friendly solution to effectively manage and deliver projects of any size. More information is available in the wiki page for ProjExec. If you haven't seen ProjExec yet, here's a demo.

I'm so excited to have this release out. The team has worked tremendously to get this out, so congratulations to everyone!! For more information on What's New in this release, go here.

New IBM Champions Announced

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Joyce Davis has just posted an announcement in the Social Business Insights Blog. You will remember that earlier this year, IBM announced 50 new IBM Champions. Joyce provides a great summary of what we look for in IBM Champions:

These individuals spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and resources evangelizing for IBM, sharing their knowledge and helping grow the community of users and business leaders focused on our solutions. As champions, they will receive an IBM Champion merchandise package (apparel and some cool gadgets!), increased visibility on IBM sites, invitations and discounts to IBM events, recognition at select conferences, and access to key IBM business executives and technical leaders. Visit the IBM Champion site to read more about the program and get to know the current IBM Champions.

While at the Lotusphere #ls12 and Connect conferences in January, look for the IBM Champions by looking at the ribbons in their conference badges. And, as you can imagine, MANY of them will be speaking at sessions, facilitating Birds of a Feather sessions, conducting book signings, being interviewed on video, and a number of other exciting activities. You might even be lucky enough to witness a group of them sing karaoke ("We are the Champions!") in the evening if you head over to Kimono's. Check out the Lanyrd page for Lotusphere 2012 for more information.

Once again, congratulations to the newly minted IBM Champions!!! (and stay tuned because nominations will open again for the next round in August)

Christian Henseler
Eric Carter
Fabrizio Marchesano, Frame srl
Glenn Kline, Perficient
Howard Greenberg, The Learning Continuum Company
Masahiko Miyo ef Co, Ltd
Mike Ostrowski, Ascendant
Peter Presnell, yellowverse.com
Rob Shoenfelt
Salvador Gallardo, Innexware
Sean Cull, FoCul, Ltd
Tom Simmons, Alacrinet
Weerapong Panpai, Zenith Comp Co., Ltd