IBM Connections - Social software for business

IBM Connections is social software for business. It empowers business professionals to develop, nurture, and remain in contact with a network of their colleagues; respond quickly to business opportunities by calling upon the expertise in their network; and discuss and refine new creative ideas with communities of coworkers, partners, and customers.

Benefits

By empowering people to easily connect with employees, partners, and customers, IBM 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
• Exchange ideas with, and benefit from the expertise of other people using Forums and Blogs
• Expand your professional network through social analytics based recommendations for people to connect with, and communities to join
• Build vibrant communities that encourage participation with sub-communities focused on key topics of interest to the members
• Access profile information, search for expertise, and view status quickly
• Stay informed of the latest updates from across your social network
• Access your social data while on the go
• Extend your social business solution by accessing people and information in several of your existing IBM solutions such as IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Quickr, and IBM enterprise content management (ECM) systems - IBM FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Manager.

IBM Connections software delivers this capability through the following integrated components:

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

• Collaborate with community members using activities, blogs, wikis, forums, and shared files, including rich media files
• Customize the community by selecting a theme for the user interface, and choosing the arrangement and selection of widgets
• View statistics on discussion forum usage and highlight important topics by pinning them for the community

Files: A file-sharing service

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

Wikis: You and your teams can 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
• Moderate blog entries
• Generate ideas and gather feedback on ideas. Get consensus on best ideas.

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 IBM 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

Forums: Provide a convenient way to create an on-line discussion board where people can ask questions, share their experiences, and discuss topics of common interest. Optionally, forums can be moderated. Participating in a forum allows you to benefit from the expertise of other people through the exchange of ideas with your teammates and others who share your interest in a topic.

Social Analytics: widgets are available in the Home Page, Communities, and Profiles and can help you to:

• Expand your professional network
• Find content and communities that might interest you

A new Recommendations widget appears in the Home Page and Communities applications.

• In the Home Page application, this widget recommends content that you might find interesting based on your existing community membership, network connections, tags, and so forth.
• In the Communities application, the Recommendations widget suggests communities that you might want to join.

The following three new widgets appear in Profiles:

• Do You Know: This widget recommends people for you to add to your network based on your existing connections, tags, organizational relationships, and actions that you have taken in the different applications.
• Things in Common: This widget helps you identify what you have in common with a person. For example, the widget might display a list of the communities that you and the profile owner both belong to, or a list of the tags that you have both used.
• Who Connects Us: This widget allows you to view the social path that links you to a person when you are viewing that person's profile. The social path displays as a list of people who link you and the profile owner.

Integrated mobile support

Many professionals travel frequently or work remotely. IBM Connections supports mobile browser access to the IBM Connections from Apple iPhone, Apple iPads, Nokia S60, and Android 2.x devices.

 

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