Last week at #IBMConnect we were able to unveil a little about IBM Connections 4.5 and you've probably already seen the demo I did during the keynote.
One of the biggest announcements is the upcoming IBM Connections 4.5 release which we are targeting for March, just 6 months after the huge release of IBM Connections 4.0 ! I also had the opportunity to present for the first time the roadmap for IBM Connections at the conference. The feedback from the audience was tremendous. Those that went to the conference, you can download my slides from the conference site and I've also posted them in Greenhouse.
If I count correctly, this would be our 11th major release in the last 6 years. IBM Connections 1.0 was first released six years ago. Since version 1.0 was released, we've added Forums, Community Events, Media Gallery, Ideation, Files, Wikis, Sub-communities, ECM integration and more. All those concepts have existed for a long time in Quickr and we've brought that over to Connections. And soon IBM Connections 4.5 will bring one more piece into Connections: content management.
This will allow you to manage files using document types, custom metadata, check-in/check-out, approval workflow, drafts, nested folders and more.
Jeff Schick, VP for IBM Social Software, spent some time discussing IBM Connections 4.5 and the roadmap for his portfolio at the conference:
To learn more about IBM Connections Content Manager, make sure you look at the slides for ID308 presented by René Schimmer and Jon Brunn which was a whole session dedicated to this. As you can tell from the video above, for those customers using Quickr that want to take advantage of the latest and greatest, we'll give them the option to upgrade IBM Connections Content Manager 4.5 and provide them with a tool to move their places and document libraries into Connections. If you want to keep using Quickr, that's fine as well. Quickr will continue to get currency updates as necessary so the option is yours.
More will be shared in the upcoming weeks as we get closer to the release date so stay tuned!