Lotus Connections

Communities: Create, find, join, and work with communities of people

• Collaborate with community members using activities, blogs, wikis, and file sharing
• Customize the community by selecting a theme for the user interface, and choosing the arrangement and selection of social software widgets
• View statistics on discussion forum usage and highlight important topics by pinning them for the community

Files: A new personal file-sharing service

• Upload files and securely share them with others
• Tag files so they can be easily located
• Add recommendations and comments
• Reduce inbox "bloat"

Wikis: A new service allows you and your teams to collaboratively edit content

• Create wikis that are standalone or associated with a community
• Create wiki pages; enter and edit content
• Compare wiki page versions to see what was changed
• Subscribe to wiki pages to be notified of changes
• Comment on pages

Profiles: Quickly find the people and expertise you need

• Post a status message informing your network of what you are doing
• Locate people and expertise using a tag cloud
• Post messages for your colleagues on their profile page

Blogs: Present your ideas in a Weblog and get feedback from others

• Create a blog for use by the members of a community
• Embed a video in a blog posting to make it available to readers

Bookmarks: Save, organize, and share bookmarks using social bookmarking

• Import and export bookmarks from and to a browser

Activities: Gather the e-mails, IM chats, documents, messages, and other information that you need to accomplish a business objective

• Create an activity for use by the members of a community

Home page: Remain informed of social data updates from across the Lotus Connections services

• Stay up-to-date by scanning the new list format for displaying updates from across your professional network
• Subscribe to people or tags in the watchlist to focus on the updates that are most important to you

Benefits

By empowering people to easily connect with employees, partners, and customers, Lotus Connections can help businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and others realize the following benefits:

• Task execution is faster through quick access to information from an expanded professional network
• Increased efficiency and effectiveness of business processes by using existing skills discovered through your professional network
• Decisions can be made with confidence knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience
• Innovative products and services can be developed using the experiences and knowledge of communities of employees, partners, and customers
• Sustainable competitive advantage can be created by leveraging innovation from across your value chain and building stronger relationships

Features

IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 is social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative, enabling efficient execution of business strategies by calling upon the expertise of networks of coworkers, partners, and customers. These networks become vibrant professional and customer communities that help you discover information, develop and refine creative ideas, and collaborate with the right people to achieve faster business results.

• Collaborate with communities of professions using wikis, file sharing, blogs, and activities
• Customize the community experience by selecting a theme for the user interface, and choosing the arrangement of widgets on a community page
• Post a status message informing your network of new best practice
• Locate people and expertise using a tag cloud
• Avoid version anxiety by sharing personal files with update notifications
• Embed a video in a blog posting to make it available to readers
• Stay informed of market trends by scanning a list of updates from across your network
• Subscribe to people or tags in the watchlist to focus on the updates that are most important to you

With Lotus Connections, you can use the collective knowledge of your organization by dynamically building new connections between people, the information they know and the activities they are executing.

Lotus Connections includes:

Files: provides a convenient way to share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other types of files with people without the need to send large files through e-mail.
With the new file sharing service, you can:

• Upload files and share them with others as readers or editors
• Choose to share files with selected individuals, groups and communities, or make them public
• View sharing properties, such as who has shared a file and with whom, people who have downloaded files
• Manage versions of a file, and allow others to upload new versions of a file
• Tag files to make them easy to find
• Recommend and comment on files
• Locate files by searching for text in the title or body of the file
• Sort files alphabetically by their name, the most recent first, the number of downloads, or by size
• Organize files in public or private collections

Wikis: allows teams to collaboratively enter, edit, and publish Web page content.
With the new Wikis service, individuals can:

• Create new wiki pages and enter content
• Add new pages to a wiki, organize them hierarchically
• Edit existing wiki pages using a rich text editor, adding HTML, or editing in wiki markup
• Compare wiki page versions to see what was changed and who changed it; restore to a previous version
• Recommend, tag, and comment on wiki pages
• Locate wikis by searching for text in their titles or page content
• Create wikis that are stand alone, or associated with a community
• Subscribe to wiki pages to be notified of changes
• Comment on pages

The wiki owner can control access to the wiki and assign read access, write access, or manager access privileges. Manager access allows one to add new members, change access for existing members, or delete members.

Communities: allows individuals with a common interest, responsibility, or area of expertise to stay in touch, share information, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects.

• Community owners can customize the look of their community by applying themes that change the styles used in the community's user interface, and moving widgets around on the community home page
• A selection of ready-to-use community themes is included with Lotus Connections 2.5. Companies can also deploy community themes that they develop for their own unique needs.
• Community owners can add activities, blogs, wikis, and file sharing services to their communities in addition to the bookmarks, feeds, and forum capabilities. This significantly enhances the options for community members to collaborate on projects and content.

The community discussion forum experience has been enhanced as follows:

• The user interface of the forum displays threads in a more conversational form, showing user pictures and conversation threads.
• Statistics for discussion forum usage can be viewed. These statistics can provide an indicator of the major discussion topics in your community, and insight into who are the most active participants.
• Important discussion topics can be highlighted by pinning them to the top of the forum.
• Community membership management has been enhanced as follows:
  • Importing multiple new members into a community can be accomplished by entering their comma-separated e-mail addresses, or importing a CSV file containing the member information you want to import
  • Community membership can be exported to a CSV file
  • These import and export capabilities can prove useful when creating a new community with the same owners or members as an existing community

Home page: The Home page service provides individuals with a consolidated view of their social data from across all of the Lotus Connections services.
Staying current with updates from across your social network has been made simpler and faster with the addition of a new Updates tab to the home page. Its features include the following:

• The new Updates tab aggregates and displays updates from across the Lotus Connections services as a sequentially ordered listing which displays the most recent update at the top. This makes it easy for individuals to scan through the list and quickly identify the updates that interest them most.
• Updates are focused on people within your network. You can also follow specific people or tags and view updates across the services in the "Watchlist."
• The list of updates can be filtered so that it displays what is most important to each viewer. The listing can be focused on updates from an individual's professional network, notifications they have been sent, or updates that are public.
• Updates from all the Lotus Connections services can be displayed, or the listing can be focused on updates from individual Lotus Connections services.
• Updates that are of particular interest can be saved and aggregated for viewing later. This is useful when you want to quickly scan through the list of updates, but do not have time at that point to read the full details.
• The MyPage tab on the home page has new customization capabilities with new choices for page layout, and an expanded selection of widgets as follows:
  • The MyPage tab which displays updates from across Lotus Connections in widgets, can now be organized into a two column or three column layout.
  • The selection of widgets for use on the MyPage tab has been expanded with the addition of widgets for the new Wikis and Files services. The new MyWikis widget, for example, displays information related to the most recent posts to an individual's wikis in order of the most recently published post. The widget also indicates who edited the wiki page, when, and its tags.
• Profiles: helps you quickly find the people you need by searching across your organization using keywords that help identify expertise, current projects, and responsibilities.
• Keeping people in your professional network advised of what you are doing, and staying informed of what they are doing helps to build and foster professional networks. Accomplishing this is now simpler and more immediate with the addition of two new features in Lotus Connections: micro-blogging and message board.
  Features of the new micro-blogging capability include the following:
  • Individuals can post a status message that informs others in their network of what they are doing.
  • These status messages can be posted using the Profiles service or the new updates tab in the Home page service
  • The individual's status messages, status messages from the people in their network, and responses to status messages are aggregated and displayed as a sequential listing on their profiles home page.
  • This provides the individual with a convenient one stop summary of who is currently doing what in their professional network.
  • The new message board capability (referred to as the Board) is a space on each individual's profiles page where people can post messages for them. Colleagues and others can post messages and create comments on status updates for an individual which are displayed sequentially.
• The combination of the board and the new micro-blogging capabilities provides a simple and easy way for people to maintain an active connection with the other people in their network.
• Lotus Connections 2.5 also enhances the tag cloud which is displayed in the profiles service. Tags associated with individuals from across the organization are now consolidated and displayed as a tag cloud. This can be used to quickly locate people with a needed expertise by clicking on the relevant tag.

Activities: The Activities service allows individuals to create online work areas where they and their teammates can gather together the e-mails, IM chats, documents, messages, and other information that they need to accomplish a business objective.

With Lotus Connections 2.5, activities can be started directly from a community. Activities created in this way are displayed on both the community's overview page, and in the Activities service view as well. Community members automatically become members of an activity that is started from the community. This provides community members with online work areas in which they can collaborate on projects.

Blogs: The Blogs service allows you to present your ideas, get feedback from others, and learn from the expertise and experience of others who blog.

The new blogs features in Lotus Connections 2.5 include the following:

• You can create a blog for the use of the members of a community
• You can embed a video in a blog posting to make it available to readers

Bookmarks: The Bookmarks social bookmarking service permits one to save, organize, and share bookmarks; and also discover bookmarks that have been qualified by others.
Moving bookmarks into and out of the Bookmarks service is now simpler. Individuals can export their browser bookmarks or subsets of their browser bookmarks into the Bookmarks service. This can prove useful when initially populating a bookmarks list in the Bookmarks service, or updating it with a new topic of interest. Bookmarks can also be exported from the Bookmarks service and imported into a browser or shared with someone who does not use the Bookmarks service.

New integrated mobile support
Many professionals travel frequently or work remotely. Lotus Connections 2.5 now supports mobile browser access to the Lotus Connections Profiles, Activities, and Blog services from iPhone or Nokia S60 devices. Examples of the capabilities provided include searching for people in profiles, updating your status, working with your activities, plus reading and commenting on blog entries.