Demo: Deep Dive of IBM Connections Content Manager 4.5

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The Information Development team has created this video to take a deep dive into IBM Connections Content Manager 4.5 which was released a little over a month ago.

Earlier I had shared a high level demo of IBM Connections 4.5 so if you missed that, or you are looking for more details specifically around Connections Content Manager (CCM), then this is the demo for you. Here are the features you will see:

• Upload and sharing files
• Configuring library settings like draft approvals, document types and metadata, etc
• Saving files as drafts
• Configuring access to files
• Searching by document types
• Refine search by custom metadata
• Tagging, liking, commenting on files
• Approving / rejecting a document

Check out the 6 minute video below:

Enjoy!

Social + CRM = Spend more time selling with IBM Connections and SugarCRM

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If you are a seller or have a sales team you may be aware of the time spent in a CRM tool such as SugarCRM managing sales opportunities.

Now, what if every time you went into a sales opportunity you could have people and information surfaced automatically to the sellers that could help them close opportunities faster ? That could significantly increase revenues as sellers become more productive and can spend more time, well, selling.

Highland Solutions posted this video to show the integration between IBM Connections and SugarCRM in what they call Semantic Sales Insights:

This is a great example of infusing social into existing business process which is the key to become a successful social business.

To learn more about Semantic Sales Insights, visit their page here.

Demo: Mindmapping with IBM Connections

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Mindjet is a collaborative work management software for brainstorming ideas, organizing information and managing projects and tasks.

As you start working on a project, you may start working on it by creating a mind map. Once you've visually outlined the information and are ready to take action, Mindjet can help you start tracking tasks towards project completion.

Recently, Mindjet integrated with IBM's Social Business Platform, IBM Connections. As tasks are assigned and the project is updated, the updates appear automatically in the activity stream.

This provides great benefit and business value to Connections users as it gives them a single place to track all their collaboration projects.

Check out the 3 minute demo below.

To learn more, check out Mindjet's page.

Demo: IBM Connections Improves Contact Center Processes

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Today, I wanted to share this quick video with you. It shows IBM's Social Business Platform, IBM Connections, deeply integrated into the work life of a help desk representative.

This allows an agent to reduce the amount of time required to find the right information to help a caller.   

Here's one of the examples shown in the video. A caller selects that they want help on increasing their credit limit via the automated voice prompts. In the agent desk, the IBM Connections community with this information, and even more specifically, the exact page within the community is opened with all the information the agent needs to resolve the call immediately.

Check out the 4 min video below:

This great integration between IBM Connections and the contact center drives first contact resolution and can reduce the time that an agent spends on the phone solving customer issues.

What a great example of infusing social into existing business processes, a key in becoming a successful social business.

To learn more, check out AVDS - Automated Voice & Data Solutions.

Webcast tomorrow: Transform your Business into a Social Business

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Tomorrow I'm going to be participating in a webcast to talk about the business value of IBM Connections 4.5.

At the webcast, I'm going to spend a good portion of the time talking about the benefits of deploying a social collaboration platform in the enterprise. In fact, we are seeing our customers really benefit of becoming a social business. In fact, here's a quick snapshot of some of the benefits you can achieve:

And as I talk to many customers across all industries and geographies, I know there's a set of concerns that organizations have when it comes to using social media within the organization. Here's a view of those top concerns and tomorrow I'll be talking about ways to overcome those:

So if you are on the fence on becoming a social business and/or want to learn more about the newly released IBM Connections 4.5 make sure you sign up for the webcast tomorrow! To sign up, click here.

See you there!

Activity Stream portlet for IBM Connections 4.5 Now Available

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The IBM Connections portlets for IBM WebSphere Portal have been updated and are now ready for download!

With this new release you can:

• Bring the Activity Stream experience from IBM Connections into portal - this means you can surface the microblogging capability of IBM Connections in the portal, including @-mentions !
• OpenSocial Embedded Experiences are now available in Portal
• Enhancements to support ideation
• Support for Portal 8.0.0.1 CF4
• Support for IBM Connections 4.5

With this release, there are now 13 portlets that bring the power of social to the portal making it extremely easy to socialize an existing site.

Here's a screenshot of the new Activity Stream portlet in Portal:

To download, go out to our catalog and get it from here and the installation instructions are here.

Check out the New IBM Social Business TV Ad Premiering Today

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IBM continues it's big push on Social Business (one of the 4 key areas of our Smarter Planet strategy along with Mobile, Cloud, and Analytics).

By now, you may have seen a recent article we published on the Wall Street Journal on competing in the Era of "Smart". This new TV ads are the next step in driving attention to the power of a social business.

Starting today, the following TV ad will be running in the United States during the Masters Golf Tournament coverage on both CBS and ESPN.

Check out the ad:

For those of you interested, the mobile TV ad is here and the analytics one is here.

Spread the word!

IBM Connections 4.5 Reviewer's Guide is Ready for Download

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The news about IBM Connections 4.5 keep on rolling. Today, I'm happy to communicate that the Reviewer's Guide for IBM Connections 4.5 is ready for download.

If you haven't read one of our Reviewer's Guide before and you are not sure what it is, here's the description:

This Reviewer's Guide provides a brief summary of the applications that are included in IBM Connections 4.5. It is important to note that these applications can be used within an organization as needed—all together or as individual applications. Capitalizing on a flexible and modular architecture, organizations may start with a single application and add other applications when they choose. As in previous releases of IBM Connections, applications can be installed easily and naturally fit into the user experience, so it is easy to expand as needed.

Therefore, if you are looking for an end-to-end review of the features in the release and it's capabilities, this a great document to go through, all 94 pages of it. We've also included tons of screenshots as well.

I have embedded the document here so you can preview it:

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To download it, go here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/connections/connections45reviewersguide/index.html

Announcing the new Social Business Data Center in Germany

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Today, IBM is announcing the availability of a new data center for Social Business in Europe.

The new facility in Germany will serve the needs of customers in Europe interested in our cloud-based social business offering: SmartCloud Connections. Just like with our data centers in the US and Asia, customers would be able to use the latest and greatest, including IBM Docs.

The momentum towards the cloud continues to show signs of growth and with this new data center we'll be positioned to better serve customers in that region. All data will remain in the European Union (EU) which eliminates data privacy concerns and legal overhead since data is not transferred outside of the EU.

Here's a customer testimonial that was published earlier this week from Colleagues in Care and how they get value from IBM Docs and SmartCloud Connections:

And here's another customer testimonial:

For more information, check out the press release here: http://ibm.co/10xAfp2

Preview: Polls and surveys for IBM Connections

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Now that we are officially in second quarter and IBM Connections 4.5 shipped, I can talk a little bit more about more things coming this year, specifically this quarter. Coming in a few weeks is a new add-on for Connections that will add polls and surveys.

With this add-on, community managers will be able to:

• Use a question-based authoring tool to create polls and surveys directly from the community
• Configure who can see results
• Configure if results are tied to a user or collected anonymously
• Notify members via the activity stream. Members will be able to respond via the embedded experience (even from their mobile devices)
• Notify members via an email notification. Members will be able to respond via the embedded experience (requires a modern email client such as IBM Notes 9).
• and much more...

The Product Manager for this offering is Marty Lechleider so if you have any questions (such as licensing), reach out to him. In fact, Marty created the following demo to show off the new capabilities of Forms Experience Builder "Next" and how it integrates seamlessly into IBM Connections:

Enjoy!

Demo: What's New in IBM Connections 4.5

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By now, you have downloaded IBM Connections 4.5, which was released last Friday, and perhaps even upgraded to that release.

Over the weekend, the information development team published this video. You can use this video to share with your end users and give them a tour of the new features in this release. (share it via a blog!)

Note that this video is specific to just the new features added in this release. If you are looking for an overview demo of IBM Connections 4.5, then check this out.

The video also covers the new Connections Content Manager and there will be another video released in the next couple of days focused on just that particular add-on for those of you interested in a deep dive.

Stay tuned for more!