Using IBM Connections Demos Now Available

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When IBM Connections 4.0 was released, I shared the IBM Connections 4.0 Overview demo. That's a great way to get your users excited for what's new in the 4.0 release. And as you know, I'm a big fan of videos and I think they are a great way to drive adoption.

Now as your users look for more in-depth demos of the capabilities of IBM Connections, you can use the following which are available in YouTube. And here's a tip! When you share these videos with your users, simply post them in a Wiki or a Blog in your Connections deployment to help spread the word.

Make sure you watch all these videos. I recommend the one for Search so you can see the new Trending widget that was added into IBM Connections 4.0. It's very cool!

Homepage

Activities

Blogs

Bookmarks

Communities

Connections Mail

Files

Forums

Moderation

No video, but I did want to highlight this awesome document posted to ibm.com. And if you are interested in a video, then I can offer this one on how to customize existing reports that ship with IBM Connections 4.0.

Search

Wikis

Heads Up: New Update for Quickr Domino

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In early December, we'll be releasing an update to Quickr Domino. This would be the second big update this year after the release we did earlier this year, back in February.

One of the top requests that I've been getting from customers is support for Internet Explorer 9. As you probably know, we've been able to support Internet Explorer 9 since July of last year through some configuration changes documented here. The upcoming update for Quickr Domino will support Internet Explorer 9 out of the box.

The update also adds support for Domino 8.5.3, the latest Domino server in the market. That way you can take advantage of all the latest and greatest features provided by Domino to run your Quickr collaboration server. I've also asked the development team to focus on quality and performance so the Quickr update will contain updates in this area.

We are targeting the publication of the update by December 9th so stay tuned.

IBM Connections 4.0 Performance Tuning Guide Now Available

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A few hours ago, the IBM Connections 4.0 Performance Tuning Guide was posted to ibm.com.

For those of you running Connections on premises or in the private cloud, you may want to go through this document. This document provides recommendations for performance tuning of IBM Connections 4 based on the experience of the performance team. I'm glad to report, if you didn't know this already, that the performance of 4.0 has significantly improved over 3.0 (which was also a huge improvement over 2.5). And our goal is to keep improving each release.

As you look through the document do note that not all the values shown will be optimal for each deployment. But this is a great way to configure your system and gives you a great starting point to start tuning from.

I've embedded the document below:



To download the full report, go here: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Connections_4.0_Performance_Tuning_Guide

Demo: Increasing Productivity with IBM Notes Social Edition

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Today, Ed Brill and team announced IBM Notes 9 Social Edition and the upcoming public beta to be released in a few weeks. If you missed it, check out Ed's blog for a link to the replay.

I've been using the internal beta for a few weeks now and really like the integration with IBM Connections, IBM's social collaboration platform.  Based on personal experience, IBM Connections makes everything social and improves the productivity of its users.  And the IBM Notes 9 Social Edition is a prime example of that.

The video below gives you a preview of some of the new integration points of IBM Connections, real-time communications powered by Sametime, and Notes all in one seamlessly integrated user experience.  The video also shows video conferencing both from Notes and from a community in IBM Connections.



I've already gotten some very good feedback on this video and I'm interested to know: What do you think about this video ?

Social Collaboration Increases Productivity

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As part of the IBM Connections 4.0 launch last quarter, I participated in the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 event. IBM Connections has become my primary collaboration platform (anyone surprised by that). It enables me to become more productive and effective which is very important to me. I am one of the many mobile workers at IBM. One of the challenges for mobile workers is staying up to date with what's happening in the office and of course, remain visible so that you don't miss out on important career opportunities.

IBM Connections provides a unique activity stream because items in the activity stream are actionable. Line of business applications can be surfaced within IBM Connections and I can interact with them directly from there. What's more, with the IBM Connections mobile app, these line of business apps are instantly mobilized with no additional development.

That's what I focused on when I built the presentation below. I wanted to show how all these different applications are not only aggregated in a single place, but allow me to take action on them!

Staying Productive with Social Streams from Luis Benitez

And check out this video as well:

If you haven't yet, start leveraging activity streams to create a smarter workforce.

VSee Releases New Real-Time Integration for IBM Connections

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VSee has just released new integration where they have brought their real-time collaboration capabilities into IBM Connections.

The integration allows companies that already use VSee to:

• See a list of community members along with presence awareness
• Click-to-chat
• Instant video chat with community members
• Instant screen share with community members

Check out a quick demo below:

For more information and to access this integration, you can access it from the IBM Connections App Catalog here. And for those of you who are using IBM Sametime, of course you can do the same things with IBM Sametime as described here.

Announcing the IBM Connections 4.0 Plug-ins for Notes

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I'm pleased to announce that we have just released the latest IBM Connections 4.0 plug-ins for Notes.  Unlike previous releases, we've now combined all of the Notes plug-ins into a single install.

Here's a highlight of some of the new and enhanced features:

• NEW: attach a file to a status update
• NEW: like / unlike a status update
• NEW: Activity stream integration allows to monitor updates for all Connections services
• NEW: search by people and communities
• NEW: Lock/unlock files
• NEW: Connections 4.0 style UI (improved formatting and layout, enlarged images, additional content including like and comment counts).
• View status updates for your colleagues, communities or organization (support for "Discover" view).
• View your board or someone else's board.
• NEW:  Microblogging within a community
• NEW:  Post a file as attachment along with posting a Status Update.
• Support for Linux desktops

I believe that these plug-ins are extremely important in helping drive the adoption of the IBM Social Business platform.  A lot of customers have been re-iterating how powerful these plug-ins are since they bring the power of social to the end user, instead of forcing the user to learn a new interface and collaborate in a different context.

If you haven't seen the plug-in in action yet, I'll be posting a demo movie later. For now, here's a screenshot that I took last year and will be sharing more later this week:

You can download the plug-ins from our App Catalog as usual here.