Connections has always been built around components, traditionally Profiles, Blogs, Communities, Dogear and Activities, as well as the homepage. Connections 2.5 significantly updates Profiles, Communities and the Homepage, as well as adding two new features, Files and Wikis. Bookmarks, Blogs and Activities remain pretty much unchanged, with the exception that you can embed them within Communities. Activities remains a lightweight task management tool, which really shines when used with Notes 8, but isn’t necessarily a Social business tool, especially if you are not a Notes shop.

In addition, the overall look and feel has been improved, and social meta-data, allowing you to quickly see number of views or replies to a topic, has been enhanced. Dogear has also been renamed to the more appropriate “Bookmarks”.

In terms of Mobile access this has been improved, with native support for iPhone and Nokia S60 platform for Activities, Blogs and Profiles. A Connections application for Blackberry is available from RIM.

Homepage
The homepage as been completely revamped, providing a “river of news”, essentially a stream of activity from within your network. This is available as an RSS feed so that notifications can come into email clients or feedreaders where people live on a day to day basis, pulling them into Connections rather than relying on people taking time in their day to log into the site.
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Here you can see updates coming from replies in forums, and notification of colleague invites, but any updates from any of the other features would also appear here. Top Updates shows activity in my network and my contributions, Discover shows me updates across the entire site, my watchlist allows me to create my own filters based on people and tags and notifications includes messages , whether people have requested to add me as a colleague or whether I have been accepted into a community.

I can mark any notification as a story if I want to review it later, and this appears under the saved stories tab.

I would imagine that the basic Top Updates would be enough for most people – if this was delivered as a feed into an email client such as Notes or Outlook it would encourage participation by notifying me when activity was happening. “My network and my contributions” is a good filter – it stops me from being overwhelmed, whilst at the same time not requiring me to explicitly mark Communities or Blog posts as things I want to watch. My network tacitly filters content for me, yet still introduces me to people outside of my network by pushing all responses to my content within this feed.

The old widget-based homepage remains, with an improved range of widgets (and you can always write new widgets yourself), but in all our time using Connections 2.5 and the beta, we hardly used it with our clients. The river of news was far more useful and intuitive, and more often than not our stories started with feeds into an email client, rather than people looking at the river of news on a web page.

Profiles

Profiles have received a welcome update, with an improved layout and the addition of status updates. Connections provides no official Adobe Air client as Socialtext does to turn status updates into true signals across your organisation, but Luis Benitez has released Bluto which uses the open API to do so, which is not only a useful application but a great example of what can be done with the Connections API. Bluto also allows you to cross-post to Twitter – just be sure you know which network you are posting to!

Status updates are posted on your board (a Facebook wall in all but name), and people can post their own comments on your wall, as shown here where a status update alerts a colleague that he needs to get in touch with Jon ASAP if he is to catch him before he goes on holiday! You can still tag other people’s profiles, which is a good way to crowdsource expertise if finding a subject matter expert is a core use case for your organisation.

There a a few things that could have been done better – including your network’s status updates under their photos for one, as well as seeing their recent posts when you view your network. There is also no “similar people” functionality to help find likeminded people, that would have to be done by browsing tags – but these are minor points, the Profiles feature is a strong update.

Communities

Communities have finally become useful in Connections 2.5. They have effectively become what would be called “Spaces” in other platforms, and can be the basic building block of your information architecture. They can be public, closed or secret, and can contain discussions, blogs, wikis, files, feeds, bookmarks and activities. They can be customised in terms of content and theme (not all Communities need have all the components) and security is inherited, so if my Community blog is secret then the blog will not be findable within the Blogs feature. If it is a public Community, the blog will appear, and will be marked as a “Community blog“. The same happens for wikis. Somewhat confusingly, the same is not true of Files of Bookmarks – they always remain part of the Community, and cannot be found in the Files feature (see Files below for more on this).

Despite these drawbacks, Communities are still very good ways of bringing together a group of resources for a specific group or community of interest.

Wikis

I was really worried about how wikis would be implemented in Connections 2.5. The wiki functionality in Quickr is dire, but I was pleasantly surprised. The Rich Text editor is easy to use, and supports images, Flash, tables, paste from Word, paste as plain text to remove formatting, and find and replace within the editor (which is a feature I’ve not seen before, and highly useful given that browsers generally won’t find and replace within an edit box).

Additionally, you can link to other wiki pages very easily with a pop-up box, but not other Connections pages (eg a Blog, Profile or Forum). You can edit in WYSIWYG, HTML or wiki text.

The wiki also supports the child/parent concept, and it is very easy to move pages around within the hierarchy. You can be notified by email of changes or comments, or subscribe to the page via RSS.

Wiki changes are recorded and you can restore previous versions. The wiki comparison feature is up there with any other wiki platform

You cannot import or export from Word (aside from Copy/Pate) – in fact you cannot export in any format, which is a big issue if you were compiling a significant amount of content and taking advantage of child/parent pages. In wikis such as Confluence you can export entire spaces, including all parent/children as one PDF or Word document, something we have implemented on many occasions for clients who find it highly useful. This would be a very onerous task in Connections.

Additionally, you can attach files to wiki pages, which is a common feature with most wikis, but is confusing within Connections as you have the Files feature as well, not to mention IBM’s other file sharing products such as Quickr. If I attach a file to a page it does not show up in my Files, also, I cannot link to a File from a wiki page, I have to re-upload it to my page.

Files

Which leads us nicely onto Files, which offers a great deal of functionality but also confusion. The Files feature allows me to upload a file, and make it private, available to everyone, or available to only certain people (with either editor or reader privileges). In addition I can add a message (ie “please review this proposal”). A nice UX touch is that people I have recently shared files with are shown to me, making it easy for me to quickly share files with my team for example. However, groups are not supported, but a Files component can be embedded within a Community, allowing a group to share files in that way.

Files can be tagged, downloaded, commented on or recommended, and these are shown so you can see how useful files are from the social meta-data. The comment feature is also highly useful in terms of recording the conversation as to how the file ended up the way it did during the review process. Making this conversation public rather than locked in email folders increases the context in which the file can be (re)used. Versions are also stored so can revert to previous versions. If someone has shared a file with me I can also share that file with someone else (only as reader). This can be highly useful, for example if someone has asked me to review a proposal, but I think that someone else might also have useful input. Bear in mind that the original author may not even be aware of the existence of the second reviewer, so it expands the author’s collaboration network across your organisation.

Folders are not supported, but you can group files as a “Collection” – essentially a single-level folder, but you cannot have Collections of Collections.

This is highly useful in terms of being able to review proposals amongst team members, so why the confusion? Files behave differently in the standalone feature and when embedded within a Community. At a basic level, a if I upload a file into a Community, even if it is public, it is not placed within the Files feature, it is locked within that Community. I cannot comment on a file in a Community making it difficult to have a conversation around a file. I cannot attach a file to a forum, or easily link to a file. Files attached to wiki pages are separate, and do not feature in the Files feature. In addition, IBM offers Quickr as a document management tool, which can be embedded within a Community. IBM customers are rightly confused as to whether they should be using Files or integrating with Quickr.

It would be much easier if any upload placed the document within your Files, and you could then link to them from blog posts, discussion forums, wiki pages or Communities. As it stands, whilst this feature is innovative and useful, we recommend clients think very carefully about how they will lead their users to understand the best way to make use of the feature, especially if they plan to take advantage of Communities and/or Quickr.

Conclusion

Lotus Connections is a huge step forward from 2.0. As we posted previously, IBM does not produce updates as often as its rivals such as Jive and Socialtext, but has a history of catching up fast after a slow start. I would recommend that any Connections 2.0 customers or pilots upgrade to 2.5 as soon as is practical, many of the problems we see in adoption of Connections 2.0 are solved by functionality only available in 2.5 – there is little sense in rolling out or persisting with 2.0 today.

Profiles, Communities and the Homepage have received welcome updates that puts Connections on a par with its rivals in terms of functionality, and Wikis and Files are welcome additions and in the main well thought through.

The areas that IBM still needs to pay attention to are consistency across Community bookmarks and files and their standalone components. IBM’s strategy around Files needs clarifying in terms of its positioning against Quickr.

That being said, the barriers to any Connections platform will not be in the technology, the platform is maturing fast and pound for pound it matches up against any enterprise Social Business platform out there today. The key to success is a detailed understanding of use cases and the specific benefits it will bring to end users. Headshift works with clients to help them uncover these, and deploy Connections in the context of business needs, rather than pilots for people to ‘play’ with.

Anyone interested in looking further at Connections as part of their Social Business Design strategy should get in touch to talk to us in more detail!

Of the three big social networking platforms, Socialtext is the only one with an out of the box desktop client. Whilst Connections and Jive offer the ability to update statuses, Socialtext takes this a lot further and is clearly positioning Signalling as a core feature of the product. The desktop client should make significant waves in the market, given how people’s use of Twitter changes for the better once they use desktop tools such as Twhirl or Tweetdeck. Put simply, it removes the barrier between thinking and contributing – a C-level exec can socialise their thoughts instantly, without having to worry about opening a browser, navigating to a page, logging in etc.

Whereas Signals was a widget on the Socialtext Dashboard, it now has a full page in its own right on the website. This allows people to focus on the Signals activity screen to pick up a sense of what is going on in their network. In the screenshot below you can see a comment about meeting up with a client, which is shared across the network so that intelligence can be informally shared. There are also public questions and answers which can be stored and referenced publicly, rather than locked away in email folders. There are also links to allow people to Signal interesting sites as they are browsing – a highly effective way of sharing links especially when compared to sending out emails, as well as downloading the client.

The client has received a lot of attention recently. Originally it showed Signals and the Activity stream of your network’s activity throughout Socialtext. These are still there, but Socialtext have added Profile information and access to wiki workspaces as well.

Signals

People

Wiki workspaces

The ability to view wiki pages themselves through the desktop client is incredibly powerful – I can find the profile information of the owner and with one click be taken through to the wiki itself to edit the page. This dramatically reduces the individual cost to the users to participate – the barrier between thinking and collaborating is reduced to next to nothing.

If Socialtext Desktop does for Enterprise 2.0 what Twhirl and Tweetdeck have done for Twitter we could see significant increases in levels of adoption, especially amongst non-IT audiences. I would also expect to see the likes of Jive and Connections follow suit with similar offerings – they all have robust APIs which could support this.

If you would like to find out more, or see demonstrations of this or other enterprise grade collaboration platforms, please get in touch!

These organisations haven’t suddenly found a corporate conscience, they are still aggressive, quarterly driven, often American companies with shareholders to answer to. This is part of a deliberate strategy to compete in the modern world. The idea is that if you give away something that your competitors see as core business, you destabilise the market, and make what you charge for more valuable.

Sun giving away Solaris, and IBM supporting Linux, destabilises Microsoft as it devalues and commoditises Microsoft’s core offering, whilst moving the differentiation toward hardware and services.

Open sourcing geological data moves the mining industry away from hoarding data to focusing on how you execute against that data, an area in which Goldmine believes it has a competitive advantage.

Pharmaceuticals can stop spending money on the leg-work of research, and compete instead on the execution of delivering quality products to market at affordable prices as quickly as possible.

This trend, should it continue, is going to effect a profound change in the nature of the workplace and the type of people companies will look to employ. Organisations will differentiate and compete on adding intellectual capital above and beyond what is publicly available, rather than try to milk a trade secret or cash-cow such as the Coca-Cola recipe. This will require more and more “knowledge workers” – people who don’t follow an administrative business process to do their jobs but rely on their experiences, professionalism and networks to add value to their organisations – or, as recently described by Thomas A Stewart,  ”someone who gets to decide what he does each morning..” (thanks to Jessica Twentyman for finding me the source!)

Organisations need to trust these professionals, they will not be in the office from 9-5 every day. These are exactly the sorts of people who thrive on their personal networks, they are the people who you go to when you need to know what’s going on. Social software brings the same level of productivity increases for these people as type-writers and then word processors did for a previous generation of workers. It takes their natural propensity to connect, to share, to add value and extends it in the same way the internet extends our access to information.

It won’t be enough to hire knowledge workers to survive and thrive in this recession. Organisations will have to change their business practices to take advantage of their abilities, and provide them with the tools to be effective. Word, Outlook and even Sharepoint won’t cut it. They will need custom built social platforms, or products such as Confluence, Jive, Socialtext and Lotus Connections.

This is not a technology driven change. These tools are a response to a new way of organising and operating companies, breaking free from 1950s management theory and production lines to treating people as individuals who get things done by independently and autonomously adding value through their networks. Organisations need to embrace the business change first, and look at the software second. Otherwise the competition will gain a significant competitive edge, whilst you’re worrying about the ROI of the investment in the latest “it’s like Facebook, but…” product.

The recent MPs expenses saga has shown an interesting case study in common sense vs business processes. When judged by whether or not their expense claims were against the rules or not, hardly any MPs have been found to have acted inappropriately. The public derision to this excuse shows that following the rules is not enough, there should have been enough common sense to know that these claims were wrong, and should not have been made, irrespective of whether they were in line with the rules.

Now it seems a new set of rules will be drawn up – however, this is unnecessary. All that needs to happen is to retain the one rule, that expenses should be “wholly, exclusively and necessarily” incurred to perform their duties – and publish all expense claims on-line. Knowing that the information is publicly available will motivate the MPs to claim only what is appropriate, irrespective of the rules.

Openness within organisations is a key factor in behaviour, it motivates people to make the right decisions, whether in terms of executive pay (as we are seeing in the publicly owned banks), company strategy or engaging in difficult conversations with the public (eg big oil).

Complex and convoluted formal business processes, as well as the expensive enterprise software required to “enforce” these processes may be required for regulatory reasons, but do not forget how simpler, social solutions (such as putting all MPs expenses on-line) can generate better results, at a fraction of the cost.

1) We’ll be focusing on using social software inside the firewall for private, secure collaboration, rather than going over topics that have been done to death such as how you can use Facebook and Twitter to promote your brand.

2) We’ll focus on real case studies of large, conservative and often regulated organisations (such as law firms) who have found real value in using these tools day to day, rather than blue-sky theory.

If anyone based in New York is interested in hearing about internal use of social software from expert practitioners in the field, I strongly recommend you attend. You can register by getting in touch with Christoph via email (Christoph@headshift.com) or Twitter (@Christoph)

eating:

poker:

bocce:

and recovery…

From Rome, we then travelled up to Villa Pignano for the wedding. Photos cannot do this place justice:

and Raffaella and her team did an amazing job of making all 60 of us feel welcome and making it an amazing day:

From Tuscany it was off to the Diva resort in the Maldives. This was an amazing place, the staff were unbelievably helpful and the facilities and food were wonderful. This was the view from our villa:

There were 5 or 6 bars and restaurants with views like these:

and some spectacular sunsets:

For our last two nights, we upgraded to a water villa, which sit on stilts in the sea, about 200 metres from the shore. This was the view from our room – with steps down into the sea!

It was an absolutely amazing holiday – and I managed not to check email the entire time!

And now… back to Enteprise 2.0…

For those that are interested, the stag do is going to be in Rome, followed by a wedding in Tuscany then honeymoon in Maldives. I promise to post photos when I’m back!

Have a good April everybody!

They are also often misunderstood, many fail to understand that profiles do not require regular maintenance or updating, and can stay current and relevant with very little effort on the profile owner’s part. This is a scenario based on Jive Clearspace (although Socialtext and Lotus Connections have very similar functionality) to show how rich, social profiles can help people do their jobs.

Here is a sample profile for Gia. Most of the content is automatically generated as Gia uses the intranet in the flow of her daily activities, rather than having to manually keep the profile up to date. Fields such as Twitter account name, expertise, phone number and photo are manually added. The vast majority, however, is automatically created, keeping the profile fresh and up to date without any effort from Gia herself.

Let’s assume I was trying to find someone who could help me with user adoption of the intranet. Perhaps my team is not using the intranet as well as I think they could.

In the bottom right hand corner of the profile we see a list of similar people within the system. This takes into account all of Gia’s activity, her blog posts, comments, discussions, tags etc. This is highly useful if Gia was exactly the person I was looking for, only to find they were on holiday, off sick, or otherwise unavailable. Immediately I can see other people who might be able to help.

Further down the profile, I can see Gia’s recent activity. Gia does not have to remember to add this, it is automatically added to her profile.

I can see that she has recently been contributing to topics around a “Watercooler”, the owners of intranet platforms and has recently been visiting clients. I can tell that this is recent activity, so Gia is clearly active within the community, and I can also see that Gia has created discussions, as well as simply replied to them.

I might wish to see all of Gia’s content, which I can do by clicking on “Gia Lyons’s stuff”.

Here I can see other topics, blog posts and content that Gia as contributed and created, and can judge whether it shows her to have the expertise I am hoping for.

On this page, and on Gia’s main profile page, I can see the tags that Gia has used to tag content on the intranet. I can clearly see that Gia has tagged items with “user_adoption”. These might be people, external websites, articles, discussions, wiki pages or blog posts of interest to her that she wanted to be able to find again quickly but it is a great resource for me. If I click on that, I see all the content that everyone, not just Gia, has tagged with “user_adoption”.

The second post from the top is a discussion on reputation points, and whether or not they help or hinder intranet adoption. If I am struggling with user adoption this is probably something I have thought about, and if not it should be, so immediately I have found something of value. I also might want to check out Ted Hopton’s page, to see if his profile is worth looking at in more detail.

At the top of the page, I can reduce the amount of content if I was only interested in blog posts, or only interested in people who had been tagged “user_adoption”. I can also see which additional tags have been used to tag “user_adoption” content. If I were to select enterprise_2.0 for example, I would see all content tagged with “user_adoption” and “enterprise_2.0”.*

Here I can see two articles by Steve Golab and Niall Cook. These two articles might be helpful, equally I may wish to go to Steve’s or Niall’s profile and start to look at their activity as I did with Gia.

I have very quickly found a mixture of content and people relevant to my query, with very little effort by myself or Gia or others involved. I may end up making connections with Steve or Niall, and find we have common interests within the organisation and work together. None of this would have been available to me in a traditional knowledge management or intranet system. The key is that the subject matter experts such as Gia, Niall and Steve had to do very little to create the social data that helped my search. As they found content and people, they simply tagged it or them (a very low touch activity), mainly to help them find the content again. As those tags are shared I benefit in the social capital being created.

* you might notice that there was also an enterprise_20 tag, as well as enterprise_2.0. This is an important point, you should consider software that suggests tags as you type them, to stop this from happening. Your community managers should also spend some time looking to aggregate tags where it makes sense.

“Many who deployed SharePoint, thought it was going to be the bridge that delivered Enterprise 2.0 and a solid platform for social tools in the enterprise is summed up statement, “We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.“

The overriding message that we are hearing is that Sharepoint is a good document management / file sharing system, especially in terms of Vista / Office / Outlook integration. There’s no reason why you can’t add social tools on top of it, but don’t look to it as a social software platform in its own right.