SnappArchive Converts Quickr Places to PDF Files

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SNAPPS last week announced that they have released SnappArchive to batch convert content in Quickr Domino places into PDF files.

This tool, available both as SaaS or on-premises, will help you with the process of managing Quickr places once collaboration in a particular place has reached completion.

Once this happens, you can use SnappArchive to quickly turn the place into a PDF, thereby preserving content in a format everyone can use.

From SNAPPS' website:

Whether you require regular archiving, are making a move to a file-based repository, need to provide your customers with documentation they can read, or have retention requirements, SnappArchive is a perfect solution to the end stage of your collaborative document lifecycle.

If this sounds useful for you, immediately reach out to SNAPPS as they are offering a free Proof of Concept for a limited time! That way, you can see what the output looks like and if it meets your need you can then go ahead and purchase the solution for use within your company.

To learn more, check out Rob's posting on SnappArchive here.

Everything You Need to Know About IBM's Global CEO Study 2012

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Last week, IBM published the results of their 2012 Global CEO Study. Below you will find some of the relevant assets related to this story: infographics, videos, results, and more. It was put together as Storify by IBMer Karl Roche.

Those of you involved in social media and social business will find the results of this study extremely interesting. The study has already received some good coverage in the press and blogs.

For example, Social Media Today highlighted the results of the study in their Why B2B Social Media Will Be "Kind of a Big Deal" article. In it, a interesting trend is highlighted: CEOs are now willing to shed command-and-control and opting for openness, transparency, and employee empowerment. Why? Because companies that do so tend to outperform others in their industry!

I strongly recommend that you go through and read through the study of 1700+ Global CEOs. Everyone in the social business industry will get value out of it.

Enjoy!

Build Communities In Your Portal with IBM Connections

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Last week, I talked about some of the new releases around IBM Connections. Most notably, the new portlets to bring IBM Connections into Portal. With these portlets you can now create community pages in portal which allow you associate a portal page with a community in Connections to enhance your portal's social collaboration capabilities.

You integrate Communities from Connections by simply associating a set of portal pages with them. These types of portal pages are called Community Pages. By associating a set of portal pages with a community in Connections, all of the Connections portlets on those pages will automatically render their content within the context of that Community.

Of course, you can create as many pages as you want for all your communities. You can even associate existing sets of pages in your portal site with the appropriate community. And this works for all types of communities: public, moderated or private.

This is critical for organizations with portal because now it's easier than ever to bring social to the user: a critical factor to drive adoption for a social business platform.

Want to see it in action ? Check out this demo which illustrates the capabilities:

What do you think?

New Widgets Available for IBM Connections Communities

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The past few weeks I've been heads down focusing on the IBM Connections Suite launch so there a couple of things that I've wanted to announce that have slipped. So let's catch up.

As you probably know, the best way to find extensions for IBM Connections is the app catalog. In the past few weeks, there's been tons of new things added to the catalog. So let me summarize:

1. New IBM Connections Portlets - The new 3.0.1.1 portlets for IBM Connections includes community pages which you can use to quickly associate a portal page with an IBM Connections community. When you do that, the page is automatically scoped to the community membership. Addittionally, you can now integrate with the Portal Search center. Stay tuned for a demo of this to be published soon!
2. Talkwheel widget for IBM Connections Communities - Talkwheel is a visual discussion platform that brands can embed anywhere, uniting and allowing your Facebook fans to talk to users on your IBM Connections page. To learn more and get the widget click here and check out the demo below.
   
   
   
3. Community File Usage Quota - This is a Greasemonkey script which allows you to see how much disk space is being used by community files. To get this, click here.
4. Enhanced Email Notification Template, Polls, User self-registration, @-mentions, and other add-ons - An IBMer from Australia has published a paper and a downloadeable asset which explains how to create certain modules for Connections such as a polling engine, a user self-registration module, and how to use the APIs to do what you want.
5. IBM Social Widgets for IBM Connections - Last but not least, a set of 8 new widgets, count them, 8 new widgets for IBM Connections Communities. These widgets are: Assets (show people and subject areas to which
   
   
   • Assets - show a table of assets stored in IBM Connections Files application
   • Community Contact - show people and a subject areas to which they are associated
   • Community Leaders - show the leaders of your community
   • Community Photos - store photos related to a community
   • Events - create community events and invite people, view your events in a calendar
   • Announcements - post announcements for the community
   • Review - join others in the community in reviewing a subject
   • Videos - post videos (including from YouTube) relevant to your community
   
   
   So those community managers looking to add some more spice to their communities, definitely check out these widgets which add a lot of features to your current communities. To download these new widgets, click here.

I also shared some of this as we recorded this week's episode of This Week in Lotus yesterday and discussed the new IBM Connections Suite. Stay tuned for that episode.

Announcing the IBM Connections Suite - Sweet !

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IBM has just announced its new social business offering: the IBM Connections Suite. The IBM Connections Suite provides the best of the best communications, content, and social capabilities in one package creating the ultimate social business offering.

How does a business become a social business? IBM has identified a foundational set of capabilities that—when implemented as a whole—can allow your business to become more social. To socially enable your workforce, improve customer care and insight, and enhance product and service innovation, an organization must consider how it will Reach, Engage, Discover, and Act as it becomes a social business. These are the 4 key services of a social business.

- Reach people where they live and work

- Enable people to engage productively in a business context

- Monitor and analyze social data to discover new business insights

- Act on insight for business advantage

The IBM Connections Suite delivers these 4 capabilities, and it's all in one package! What does it include? Everyhing you could want: profiles, communities, microblogging soft phone / VoIP, presence awareness, instant messaging, web meetings, video, forums, wikis, social analytics, blogs, media gallery, ideation, real-time collaboration with communities, peer to peer file sharing, document libraries, mobile apps, and more!

To demonstrate some of the capabilities provided by the IBM Connections Suite, I've created three demos. Each demo shows how the IBM Connections Suite delivers business value and helps companies achieve one of three outcomes: workforce optimization, improving customer care processes, and accelerate innovation.

Demo 1 - IBM Connections Suite for Workforce Optimization

Demo 2 - IBM Connections Suite for Customer Care

Demo 3 - IBM Connections Suite for Accelerating Innovation

Of course, it's hard to show the 300+ features that are in the IBM Connections Suite in a couple of 5 minutes videos, so I'll be interested in knowing what you would like me to show more of. Please let me know in the comments below.

The announcement letter with more details, can be found here.

New IBM Connections Plug-In for Symphony and OpenOffice Demo

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A while ago, I blogged about all the different plug-ins available for Symphony which brought the social capabilities of IBM Connections into Symphony. For those of you who don't know, Symphony is a free productivity suite based on OpenOffice, which coincidentally shipped a new release on Tuesday. And speaking of OpenOffice this same plugin has been released as an OpenOffice extension!!!

Of course, I'm pretty much a month late with these news, but there's now a new IBM Connections plug-in for Symphony, as Ed Brill announced earlier. The new plug-in adds the following capabilities:

• Add a Lotus Symphony document to a IBM Connections activity, blog, or wiki.
• Create a To Do item for an activity.
• Add a Spreadsheet or Presentation document to an activity.
• Add a URL as a IBM Connections bookmark.
• Insert data from a IBM Connections profile into Lotus Symphony documents.
• Open and share files in IBM Connections files.

And because it works inside of Symphony, it'll work in Linux, Mac, and Windows with any IBM Connections 2.5 server or above.

To me this is important because I believe in the power of bringing social to the end user to accelerate adoption of social business.

To show it off, I recorded this 9 minute demo which walks you through the features of this new plug-in plus the plug-in for the newsletter generator and a special one for those using the IBM Connections Content Edition.



For more details on this new plug-in available at no extra cost, check out the help document and to download & install it, go here (for Symphony) or here (for OpenOffice). The video above shows how to install it (hint: it's super easy!!).

Enjoy!

How To Post Events into an OpenSocial Activity Stream

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Back at SXSWi 2012, I presented about Enterprise Social Media Trends and talked about OpenSocial and ActivityStrea.ms. OpenSocial was also a big topic at this year's Lotusphere 2012 conference. I've gotten probably about 10-15 requests on how to use these APIs in the last week, especially as a follow on to my post on How To develop Apps for IBM Connections so I thought it was time to create a blog entry for it.

As it turns out, yesterday Suzanne posted a great tutorial on how to get started with OpenSocial and Embedded Experiences.

I went through the tutorial and within 5 minutes I already had posted an event into the OpenSocial server with an embedded YouTube video as shown below. Very easy!:

The final step is to create a JSON object to push the event into the activity stream. I'm guessing that most of the people reading this are developers, so I'm going to use curl which works in most operating systems. I issue this command from the command line:

curl --user username:password https://connections.swg.usma.ibm.com/connections/opensocial/basic/rest/activitystreams/@me/@all/@all -X POST -L -H "Content-type: application/json" --data-binary @youtube.json -i -v --insecure

And here's how the JSON object looks:

{ "generator": { "image": { "url": "http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/Q5CU9cMvk7k/hqdefault.jpg"}, "id": "ytapp", "displayName": "YouTube Application", "url": "http://www.youtube.com/" }, "actor": { "id": "@me" }, "verb": "post", "title": "Video has been posted and is live !", "content": " You have created a new YouTube video.", "updated": "2012-05-08T12:00:00.000Z", "object": { "summary": "Video posted to YouTube", "objectType": "note", "id": "yt12", "displayName": "YouTube Video", "url": "http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/ee/video.xml", }, "openSocial":{ "embed": { "gadget": "http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/ee/video.xml", "context": "Q5CU9cMvk7k" } } }

And voilá. That's all it takes. Now go have fun!
{ "generator": { "image": {"url": "http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/Q5CU9cMvk7k/hqdefault.jpg"}, "id": "ytapp", "displayName": "YouTube Application", "url": "http://www.youtube.com/" }, "actor": { "id": "@me" }, "verb": "post" , "title": "Video has been posted and is live !", "content": " You have created a new YouTube