IBM Lotus Connections - Virbmedia.virbcdn.com/files/f0/FileItem-57864-ibm.pdf · IBM Lotus Connections Positioning IBM is a very large player in enterprise software marketplace in

IBM Lotus Connections

PositioningIBM is a very large player in enterprise software marketplace in general, and in the growing but smaller marketplace for social software. IBM has been supporting

enterprise collaboration and communication products for over 20 years, with Lotus Notes and related products. 35% of the Fortune 100 are using IBM social

collaboration solutions. Connections debuted in 2007 and is the fastest growing software product in IBM history. It is based on modern ideas of social technologies

and IBM positions the product as “social software for business,” which seems like an awfully broad charter. However, Connections has a rich set of a variety of

integrated components, including these:

Profiles -- Users create rich profiles, including tag clouds and status updates.

Home Page -- Consolidate messages and updates from across your network, including updates from other users or by following tags.

Communities -- Groups, projects and interests, and containing various collaboration modules.

Activities -- Status updates from people and data.

Blogs -- Social media for teams and companies.

Wikis -- Collaborative social documents.

Bookmarks -- Save and share important links.

Forums -- Theme-based user forums.

Files -- Save, share and update files.

Connections is very much a social software layer that can link together other tools -- like WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and other

IBM and partner technologies -- into a rich and sophisticated solution for the enterprise.

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Connections is very much a

social software layer that can link

together other tools -- like Lotus

Notes, Lotus Quickr, Lotus

Sametime and other IBM and

partner technologies -- into a rich

and sophisticated solution for the

enterprise.

Scenario-Based EvaluationThe Connections product team devised a very full implementation of the various scenarios.

Like some others in the study, there were features in the near-term roadmap that would have

made some examples a bit more seamless, but the scenarios demonstrate that Connections

is a broad social platform with wide capabilities. Relative to the driving motif of this report,

streaming is among the most recent innovations in Connections, and so, at times, I could

clearly see work in process. The demos were based on what is going to be a Q4 2010

release, so this is very up to the minute.

A word about Connections ‘openness’. Connections can be configured to be totally public

(published to the web so that anyone can participate), totally closed (so only those with

password access can enter), or set up in an intermediate ‘DMZ’, where some elements are

public and others locked down. Some companies that want interaction with partners or

customers use Connections native implementations for that, such as public communities,

while others use Connections’ API or Atom feeds to integrate Connections functionality into

their websites.

Connections is configured to run on a company’s computing infrastructure, and in general,

users are employees of that company, or others who are granted access to the company’s

computing resources. As a result, a consultant working with several companies would have

several different logins, and no consolidated dashboard across them, unless they are using

IBM's online collaborative cloud environment, LotusLive, which gives them a single point of

access to several companies.

Cross-Company Scenario[Note: The Cross-Company Scenario is detailed in the Introduction of this report.]

The cross-company scenario drew out a great deal of the basic functionality in Connections.

A Connections profile is shown to the right.

On the far right there are various widgets displaying information drawn from Connections, like

who is in his network, who he reports too, and various links. Note that those people in his

network share a reciprocal following relationship with him, but it is possible to have non-

reciprocal following as well. The Report-to Chain is a great example of the sort of features that

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IBM 1 - Connections Profile

are likely to be highly useful in large companies, which matches the profile of many of IBM’s

customers.

In the center, below her profile information, on the tab called ‘The Board’ you can see

activities, which is the Connections version of her stream. The most recent update is also

displayed under the user’s photo, as are various tags that he has used to characterize his

professional interests. These are helpful for finding people based on expertise and interest.

When a user navigates away from their own profile, or the profiles of others, and moves to the

‘Home’ tab, they are presented with what is known as a ‘Newsfeed’, shown at right. As it

says at the top, here you can ‘view updates from content or people you are following, your

colleagues, and responses to content you’ve posted.’ This is a consolidation of actual

updates and postings, as well as social gestures like another user adding you to their

network.

Also shown in the Newsfeed screenshot is My To-Do List, which is a handy widget to display

the most urgent tasks. In this case a task that is overdue is highlighted in red.

Getting into the specifics of the AdjectiveNoun cross-company scenario, one obvious way to

represent the many groups involved in the Conglomerated Donuts project is to employ

Connections Communities. A Connections community typically includes the tools that a group

might need to collaborate on a shared project or interest, such as blogs, discussion forums, a

member list, activities, home page, wikis, files, and bookmarks. The community's manager

decides which components are included, and also decides if the community is open to all

users or to a more selective group of people.

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IBM 2 - Newsfeed

The IBM team created a Conglomerated Donuts community, so that people outside the

AdjectiveNoun team could be invited in.

Today’s implementation of Communities does not have a single unified stream across all the

varied community tools. At present, each tool has its own display, as you see in IBM 3, at

right, with two subcommunities and a forum having been created. However, communities do

have a single stream view in the Connections mobile application.

In our scenario, we had envisioned different subprojects for the software contractors and

another for the AdjectiveNoun team. Here is an example with two marketing projects for a

project Zeus.

Sucommunities allow different access controls and different tools to be used by different

groups. For example, in this case, the project planning and advertising teams could be made

up of different groups, and different capabilities could be integrated in each.

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IBM 3 - Commmunity

IBM 4 - Mobile Commmunity

Connections provides pretty sophisticated views over activities, like activity outlines, allowing aggregation by topical sections. In IBM 6, below, you can see how User Feedback Items are segregated from Design Updates,

and so on.

To-Dos (tasks), like all other objects in the system have comment threads, and that even in the outline view all sorts of activities can be created, edited, tasks checked off, and so on. Also, tasks assigned to a user in a project

like Consolidated Donuts show up on their personal to-do list, and can be synched with outside calendars, like iCal or Lotus Notes.

In our document-centered world, there are many instances when a file has be reviewed and approved. Below is a Connections To-Do attached to a post that also has a file -- a design update -- attached. While this nesting of

to-dos in other objects seems to be needed in a world dominated by files, I wonder at the possible confusion at so many sorts of nesting.

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IBM 6 - Activitites/To-DosIBM 5 - To-Do

Business Development Scenario[Note: The Business Development Scenario is detailed in the Introduction of this report.]

The thrust of the business development scenario is to see how well the streaming application

supports business development functions, like marketing and sales.

The implementation of Connection To-Dos can support a task list approach to those

functions, but do not specifically support a sales qualification sort of workflow. However, any

enterprise interested in a close integration with more structured sales tools could use

Connections API to implement it, just as IBM has integrated help desk and other tools. There

is no out-of-the-box ability to ‘roll up’ weekly sales results from four regional sales managers,

for example, into a single sales number for the company, although that could be

accomplished through the API.

Much of the outreach capabilities of Connections could be based on integration with IBM’s

Lotus Live, an online collaboration service. LotusLive Connections provides a large subset of

the Lotus Connections capabilities, as well as capabilities that make more sense in the online

setting, like polls, webinars, and sharing of communities across multiple companies accounts.

To the right is a LotusLive survey, based on a predefined customer satisfaction template. As a

result, a LotusLive user could create surveys in this way, but they aren’t integrated into

LotusLive Connections directly, so a marketing person might manually import graphs or other

data from a survey into Connections as a way to share the results with team members.

LotusLive also includes the capability to email these surveys and webinar invitations based on

a managed email list.

LotusLive has a number of other services that complement Connections, like iNotes, a

lightweight email, calendaring and scheduling system. I haven’t investigated exactly how this

LotusLive services cohabit, but my guess is that they are fairly independent, and you would

have to choose to not use iNotes calendar if you were using LotusLive Connections for tasks

and calendaring. Similarly, there are is a Outlook integration available for Connections, which

allows Outlook to act like a Connections client, at least to a certain extent. For example, it

allows attaching an Outlook attachment to a Connections activity, so it serves to bridge

across the larger world that are on email, but not collaborating with you on Connections.

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IBM 6 - LotusLive Connections Survey

Human Resources Scenario[Note: The Human Resources Scenario is detailed in the Introduction of this report.]

IBM’s Connections team suggested that the best course for the Human Resources scenario

would be to model the project, once again, as a community. In this case, the HR

professionals at AdjectiveNoun could announce the job opportunities both on the internal

Connections solution, as well as on the company’s external web site through widgets. In

either case, candidates could upload resumes which would be directly placed into the private

Human Resources community. Subsequently, the HR staff could follow up, schedule

appointments, and so on. The screenshot at right shows such a community, where the

resumes are associated with tasks that are assigned to members of the HR community to

follow up. Resumes were drag-and-dropped into Connections via connectors for both Lotus

Notes email and Outlook.

The end-to-end handling of a candidate’s application would likely be handled by the

application of the general use of to-dos, or alternatively a third party solution could be

integrated.

The LotusLive online webinar capability could be one way to conduct training of all sorts, as

well.

Connections profiles can be linked to external direction solutions, like LDAP and Active

Directory, which provides a rich, extensible, and verified mechanism for building very elaborate

profiles. For example, the company could verify is a technical staff member had actually

passed a database certification, or if accounting staff were verified to use the payroll system.

Connections supports sophisticated auditing of all documents and data, so that varius kinds

of compliance for regulated industries is possible, like pharma, financial services, and others.

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IBM 7 - Emailed Resumés

Other ServicesLotus Atlas for Connections is a social network analysis tool that could help in large companies seeking to understand how different parts of the organization connect

and communicate, by exposing the structure of the company’s social network, where the bridges and hubs among various groups occur. This can accelerate finding

expertise, for example.

Connections supports integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, where Sharepoint widgets make Sharepoint documents accessible within communities. This is obviously

of special interest to companies with large Sharepoint implementations, who are seeking a more social, streaming experience.

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Connections supports

integration with Microsoft

Sharepoint, where Sharepoint

widgets make Sharepoint

documents accessible within

communities. This is obviously

of special interest to companies

with large Sharepoint

implementations, who are

seeking a more social,

streaming experience.

ConclusionsI came away impressed that Lotus Connections technically matches the marketing positioning very well. Connections is a large and broad collection of social

collaboration capabilities, especially well-suited to large enterprises, especially those that are document-centric. IBM has a long roster of complex and rich

technologies, both homegrown and from partners -- like help desk, online webinars and surveys, mobile applications, Microsoft Sharepoint, and others -- that allow a

wide spectrum of configuration options, and providing a great degree of customization while maintaining the core architecture of Connections.

IIBM has moved to roll out streams across the Lotus Connections application -- for example, the home page shows streams of people’s status updates and content

updates.  However, a community-scoped news stream is only available on mobile devices at this point, and having that in the individual communities is likely to be on-

going for some time. It has become the dominant motif of collaboration and coordination in Connections. The only hiccup in this rapidly maturing capability is the way

that Community widgets don’t show a stream’ however, the streaming elements from communities show in the expected way in the user home page and the mobile

clients.

I believe that Connections is likely to seem less like a set of communities made up of discrete collaboration tools -- containers for forums, blogs, profiles, wikis, files,

and so on -- once the roll out of streams is completed. Once all of these collaboration tools are principally experienced as elements of streams -- created in streams,

read in streams, commented on and elaborated on in streams -- they will seem to be more alike than they do now. And, as another benefit of that user experience

transition, the portal-like feel of communities will decrease: they won’t feel like a collection of widgets displaying various sorts of information in discrete rectangles.

Instead, the single unifying metaphor of streamed information, filtered and aggregated in different ways, will simplify the user experience of Connections, which is

possibly a bit overwhelming to those not well acquainted with it. We can see the first parts of that transition in the version now coming to market.

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I came away impressed that

Lotus Connections technically

matches the marketing

positioning very well.

Connections is a large and

broad collection of social

collaboration I came away

impressed that Lotus

Connections technically

matches the marketing

positioning very well.

Connections is a large and

broad collection of social

collaboration capabilities,

especially well-suited to large

enterprises, especially those

that are document-centric.