What's New in the April 2015 Release of IBM Connections Social Cloud

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As we run our final checklist to turn on the new features, I wanted to give you a heads up as to what to expect next week.  I had the opportunity to give a preview of these to the audience at Social Connections, the independent IBM Connections user group, last week in Boston.

The conference was great as usual.  It was completely sold out as usual was great. I had the opportunity to meet with developers (check out this related post) as well as customers/users.  I learned about how they are driving the culture shift and increasing the adoption of Connections within the organization.  So much insight! The next Social Connections has been announced for October 2015 in Stuttgart, Germany (Oktoberfest anyone?)

So on to next week, here's a few things that you can expect:

• New custom layouts for communities so that you can tailor your communications to your team
• Drag-n-drop apps between columns in a single step
• Responsive apps so that they adjust to the right column width
• Type-ahead search for recently visited content to get back to where you've been faster
• Access Activities via the mobile device

Here's a sample of a community with apps moved around:

To give you a visual idea of what to expect, check out these couple of slides:

What's New in IBM Connections Social Cloud - April 2015 from Luis Benitez

And for those of you who couldn't make it to Social Connections 8, here's the presentation that I delivered:

Social Connections VIII - Innovation and Communications Drive Business Value from Luis Benitez

Enjoy!

How To Integrate Your App with IBM Connections Cloud with 2 Lines of Code

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Last week I was at the IBM Connections user group conference, called Social Connections, in Boston MA.  There, I got the opportunity to meet with many end users as well as developers interested in building apps for IBM Connections.

A particular session that I got great feedback from developers was the one titled Mastering the IBM Connections Developers Experience. Vijay Francis and Paul Bastide took the audience through the options to integrate with IBM Connections Cloud.  One of the samples was how to take an existing app and bring in our navigation components into it in less than 30 seconds!

So imagine you have an app like this:

Now let's take that and add the IBM Connections Cloud navigation to it.  Add a couple of lines of code and boom!

Now, you have an easy and consistent way for users to go back and forth between your app and the main Connections interface. So how did I do this? As easy as 1-2-3:

1. Add the following before the closing body tag in your web app
   
   

   <script src="https://apps.na.collabserv.com/navbar/banner/partner/navBar?oneui=3" type="text/javascript"></script>

2. Add the following to the head tag
   
   

   <link href="http://apps.na.collabserv.com/theming/theme/css/3" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"></link>

3. Add the following CSS classes to your opening body tag
   
   

   class="lotusui30 lotusui30_body lotusui30_fonts scloud3"

And if you look at the steps above, basically you are using 2 lines of code to do the integration. Easy!

For more information check out these links:

• Add the Connections banner to your app
• IBM Connections Cloud Navigation Tips & Tricks - Van Staub
• Seamless User Experience with IBM Connections Cloud - Paul Bastide
• Reuse the IBM Connections Cloud Banner in Apps - Niklas Heidloff
• How to Build a Hello World App for IBM Connections
• IBM Connections Developers - http://developer.ibm.com/social