Social Media

IBM ConnectEd Conference 2015 Day 1

The IBM ConnectED conference (formally known as LotusSphere) was dramatically different this year. It was scaled down to just two hotels and having most sessions in the smaller Swan hotel was a preview of how the size had changed. The opening welcome session was previously a fun event to connect with people and enjoy some good food. This year the welcome session was two very limited food options, long lines, and cramped spaces with loud speakers blaring music so loud nobody could communicate. This was a real disappointment – it was always a great reconnect time and I think they could have scaled it down without making it … painful. If they had just made the space larger with tables to sit at I’d gladly paid for food and drinks.

The opening session was pretty low-key compared to previous years but still had some great demos and the guest speaker was pretty interesting even if not a super star. I guess there was some live music, but I totally missed it.

The first session I attended was the Connections & Mobile update. Lots of good news here but the presentation wasn’t as straightforward compared to last year which was very clearly laid out. Here are some coming items I see of very high value:
  • File Subfolders. Long resisted by IBM but implemented by every other tool on the planet. The implementation looks like what a user would expect from their filesystem or tools like DropBox – great news.
  • Real Community customization. New templates to control layout of column choices and responsive design where thing can move from left, middle, or right column. Widget titles can finally be changed. We’ve done this forever with our custom widgets, glad it’s finally supported for all. Very impressive but I’m trying to figure out why Mobile won’t be leveraging the hard work community owners do to customize the space.
  • New Profile page view – looks great, looks like mobile. Can we change all the applications to just look and work like Mobile on the web?
  • Open files in Office (auto locks and edit). Very nice update
  • Custom streams. Detail specific people or places you want updates on and get a visual count of what’s new on a new dashboard page.
The next session was on TDI and changes to support external users. The presentation was very clear and well done. A few key items I took away from this:
  • Not all areas make sure you know you are sharing externally – desktop tool one example.
  • All external users are very limited in sharing and mentioning because they have no directory search options. Really limited to communities they are in.
  • TDI work is pretty straightforward. Using another LDAP branch great way to keep things clean.

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Next I went to the customer panel on five companies telling their collaboration and social story. Geoff Englemeyer at AT&T did a great job sharing our work!
Last session was on API and Connections Cloud. Pretty interesting how the cloud version can now be customized to your company including themes, apps and other things.  Some general API talk but mostly not relevant for on premise usage.

Last part of the day we talked with some of the IBM Docs team about some of the features coming later this year. Sounds like some nice changes to the editor to be more properly paginated and options to upload a new version over the top of an existing version.

Good day with lots of interesting updates.

IBM Connect 2014 Conference Notes

I attended the IBM connect conference this year and saw a lot of very impressive updates coming the product. The things that interested me most were the ability to keep people working with activity streams and engaging people through @mentions updates. The changes to the mobile application for tablets are quite impressive and illustrate IBM’s dedication to mobile first design. The only big disappointment for me this year was not seeing a major overhaul of the wiki tool which lags behind just about every tool in that space. While the wiki got a little bit of attention with a few simple macros, it so far behind other vendors like it Atlassian I don’t know if they’ll ever come close to catching up or have a really viable wiki solution.
Another big thing announced at the conference was the rebranding of everything IBM in the collaborative space as “Connections”. So is Connections Mail the plug-in for mail in Connections or Lotus Notes client? 🙂
 
New Editor Option for All Connections Applications
IBM Connections will soon have the option of a new advanced editor based on Ephox Live. This rich Java based editor will provide advanced options not normally offered on a web editing system including excellent copy/paste from Microsoft Office, revision history, drag and drop, dynamic photo editing and more. For more information watch this demonstration video and you’ll see why it’s a “big deal”.
I’m not excited about short-term feature parity issues (IBM adds features to editor not yet in Ephox) and the fact it requires desktop Java. Once they have a JavaScript-based solution with the same feature set IBM has for things like file pickers it may actually be the leader of the pack on editor features and fidelity for social business content creation. It’s unfortunate the ability to switch back-and-forth by the end-user is an integrated out-of-the-box, however it seems there may be mechanisms to do this with a customization.

Connections Next Upgrade
 Connections Next has a big emphasis in support for external collaboration, file sync,  usability, and a better activity stream. It’s quite unclear to me what will be available and when but I suspect most of this will be available in the first half of the year based on past history.
  • External Collaboration. Support for creating external communities and inviting people outside the company to collaborate on on your internal connections installation. External users have very limited customized views to see just their profile, communities approved for external use, and activity stream. This seems VERY well thought out and I’m sure due to a lot of conversations with their customers prior to rolling it out 🙂
  • Recent Activity Feature. New “Recently Viewed” feature from menu allows you to quickly get back to recently visited places.
  • Cleaned up Activity Stream. The Following, Discover, and Status Updates views are now just tabbed filters for a new “Updates” left hand menu. You’ll no longer see random like information in the stream and only the most relevant content for you is displayed. Likes have thankfully been demoted and won’t be so prominent.
  • New Activity Stream Search. You’ll be able to search the activity stream easily and add hashtags in comments.
  • @Mentions Anywhere. Quickly draw attention of any content in Connections to other users by mentioning them – in a forum, comments, blogs, anywhere. This is probably the most important new feature to make the platform fully interactive. I was shocked IBM didn’t deliver this a feature at a time, very good move on their part IMHO.
  • Sharing links shows external content and images. When you share a link on your homepage it will now include summary description and image from source site (relies on site supporting OpenGraph standard). This will be very nice for external sites, but for most companies their internal communications probably do not support the standard to make this work. Still it looks great and what users expect from the consumer space.
  • Forums sortable by date. Forums display in conversation/threaded mode today but you’ll be able to get a flat list sorted by newest/oldest date. I don’t think I’d ever use this but people ask me about it all the time so glad to have it.
  • New Files view with preview option. You’ll be able to see your files as a list of thumbnails and easily preview content like powerpoints without downloading them. The former media gallery tool will be retired since you’ll be able to have this feature at a folder level. That also would allow users who had media galleries to simulate multiple media galleries using folders and this new view and preview option.
  • Make an feature your Community Homepage. If you’d like recent activity or your blog to be your community default page you can now select that. If you’ve wanted a Chatter/Google + style microblog community you can now create one. This feature is long overdue and very welcome.
  • Trash can for deleted communities. Deleted your favorite community despite all the warnings? Now you can restore it from the new recycle bin! I’m sure it is never ever happens at your company right?
  • New Q&A view for all Forums. Now you can easily see your unanswered questions in the forum using a new view. The current Q&A view inside of the forums application wasn’t very useful because you have to follow the actual thread for it to appear in the view.
  • Community Folders. Duh. The single most confusing update to Connections was shared community folders. Nobody understood why they had to create a personal folder and share it with a community to have folders in a community. Finally Communities has basic feature parity with standalone file users – this is about 3 years too late for me. #overdue
  • Custom streams. You can add all the filters you want to the activity stream so you can slice and dice it but the bottom line is that’s a lot of work every time you want to find a specific set of updates. No end-user wants to go tweak all those filters and contort their following feeds just to get updates for a specific set of community forms. Now you be able to create a filtered list based on whatever criteria you want and visit that list later. I suspect most advanced users will really use the updates view anymore and migrate to a set of custom streams.
  • New Notifications View. In the current product there are really three streams that make up what most users would consider “notifications“ (mentions, notifications, action required). From what was shown on stage, and in the user experience lab, this new stream consolidation will be combined with a drop down box at the top the Connections page to see recent updates. A bell icon appears in the menu and is badged with the number of updates in your consolidated stream. #overdue
See presentation ID400 for more details
 
Mobile Update
The new mobile update that is coming out benefits from IBM’s new design process. IBM took a step back and looked at how specific types of users would engage the mobile interface and what features would be important to them as they try to complete their tasks. Here are some of the things I noticed in the demo:
  • The ability to favorite any specific location in connections. So if you have a favorite form you often visit you can connect to the left menu so that you can get there more easily in the future.
  • A recently visited drop-down will make it easy for people navigating around the application to go back to a recent feature much like they would using browser history or the browser back button and a web application.
  • The left-hand menu can be customized by the user to remove options and put them in an order that makes sense for how they engage with the application.
  • Custom streams allow the mobile user to track very specific types of connections content and pin those streams for easy access. Finally I can have a mobile activity stream for forums I’ve been designated to “moderate”. #overdue
  • A radical redesign of the blog application called “blogboard” allows the user to graphically explore both regular and ideation blogs. There is a very nice rendering of individual blog entries and they read later option that will store blogs in memory for offline access.
  • Support for notifications of file sync and activity stream notifications using the device notification network.
  • A whole new look for IOS 7!
File Sync
One of the key capabilities being added to IBM connections is the ability to keep your files in sync between desktop, mobile, and web. This of course involves updates to the mobile application, desktop connector, and server version. On stage they showed someone editing a document on IBM Docs and how after publishing it the file on the desktop was also updated. There is a new option to designate what documents will be sync’d and they have some special UI changes to mobile and desktop to make it easy to work with the files you need to keep in sync. While this is a clear win it, clearly adds more confusion about the role of CCM and Files and which feature can do what. IBM needs to just make CCM part of the core product and allow personal files to be stored in CCM making it a unified experience whether you need simple or complex file sharing. The files / CCM strategy is still MIA.
 

New Social Programming API/Toolkit.

Connections has a robust API but it’s very low level plumbing using ATOM and ATOMPub XML protocols. Now there is a way to develop using native language bindings in JavaScript, Java, iOS, and soon PHP. The new “playground” application let’s you explore the API and test it out easily with little or no knowledge of the underbelly of Connections. If you have a greenhouse account you can try out the Playground .
See presentation for session AD301 for more details.
IBM Docs Updates for 2014
Many of the announced IBM Docs updates reflect attention to the weaker parts of the product offering. Notably the viewing experience is terribly subpar in some cases like the spreadsheet. Viewing can also be done in an observer mode allowing participants in a conference call to be part of the live editing session without being an actual editor.
  • Assignment based workflow. More easily manage collaborative work in the document that goes beyond the current placed comment mechanism.
  • Observer mode so you can share the same great viewer as the editor without the overhead
  • Better HTML Viewers. Thank goodness the spreadsheet viewer today is a complete joke. #overdue
  • AirPlay dual-display mode
  • Online co-editing from iPad
  • Viewing on Android
  • API models for plug-ins and workflows (AD103 Presentation). Still trying to wrap my head around this one.

Check out main presentation, ID601, for more details.

Overall I’d say this was one of the more impressive conferences from an announcement perspective but felt the hands-on technical sessions were a bit lacking in comparison to previous years. Overall a great use of time for anyone using these products.
As a side note, if you’re interested in a Connections consultant help please connect with me on Twitter at @greatjava – I’d love to chat with you about how I can help! 

Some Interesting items from LS12

The Connections “next” features were some of the most interesting announcements:

  • Activity Streams & Open social support. Redesigned homepage. embedded experiences.
  • OAUTH2 support.
  • New mobile tools in major appstores, very nice stuff.
  • Superior integration with Microsoft assets.
  • New tool called IBM docs will allow Google wave style editing of office docs with Connections as the storage cloud (files).

Fun, Interesting things….

  • Michael J. Fox and Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks in opening sessions.
  • I won a crazy goofy hat that I’m unlikely to wear.

Some things that drove me nuts at LS

  • You can’t take pictures of an important slide?
  • You can’t stand up in the in back or move a chair?
  • Social conference with no working wifi? Wow.
  • If you plug in your device during a session they will take it away until session ends?

Making Feeds Fun and Friendly

I’m disappointed with how hard it is to get people to use feeds to track updates on websites. The idea is pretty simple. You start your online browsing experience from a special feed reader tool that collects updates from your favorite websites. It’s a real time-saver because you don’t have to visit the websites to keep up, the latest stories are delivered to you. I think one of the barriers to these tools is that the user interface to track the latest stories often looks more like an email program – it just doesn’t draw in users.

Those "boring" days should be ending with new feed tools that create special custom pages and integrate social networks. The new FireFox tool called Feedly is a great example.

So what’s cool about this? Feedly works with Twitter and Google Reader (feed tracking tool) to create a magazine-style page with graphics, summaries, and more. I can use the navigation tools at the top to pick categories like "nook" or "news". When I view a story I see the latest tweets on the topic. The only thing missing with Twitter integration is for me to share stories with people in my Twitter network. Very nice work, I like it!

So what’s cool about this? Feedly works with Twitter and Google Reader (feed tracking tool) to create a magazine-style page with graphics, summaries, and more. I can use the navigation tools at the top to pick categories like “nook” or “news”. The only thing missing with Twitter integration is for me to share stories with people in my Twitter network.  Very nice work, I like it!  If you are a Firefox user check it out at http://feedly.com.

Google Reader has just rolled out a new feature aptly called “Play” that does a slideshow of your latests website updates. It makes it fun and easy to recommend and favorite items. Check it out at http://www.google.com/reader/play/

Sharepoint for Enterprise Social Media?

The answer is no.

A friend of mine says software selection is only 10% of what makes a successful solution. I’ll agree if the software options all have a set of base features you need! I think the point is there is a lot more to a successful implementation than the underlying software platform (and I’m learning more every day).

Having a few years experience trying to implement Social Media tools in a big company I have a few thoughts on what those base features are.  This week I’ve been asked three times about Sharepoint, so I decided to blog my opinion.  I’m not trying to bash Sharepoint, it does Microsoft Office team collaboration quite well. The lists feature is very powerful and underused. You can build simple Intranet sites with it quickly. So, I’ll explore what I think a social platform should be, and note why I think Sharepoint doesn’t have the core features you’ll need.

Social software starts with the individual.  Your sales division isn’t a social entity, but the people in it are.  While an enterprise social software solution should recognize the reality of the organization (but maybe not focused on the corporate hierarchy) its focus must be the individual contributor. The data you capture should use tags, search, and personal networks to bring it all together.  One easy example is bookmarks.  Individuals add bookmarks to the system with a URL, description, and a set of tags.  Ideally, a user should be able to target that bookmark to an interest group, blog, etc.  People in that individual’s network should see the fact the bookmark was added.  Anyone can search by tag or description and find other relevant or recommended bookmarks. It’s more than adding a link to a site. Sharepoint allows you to add a URL to a site, that’s where it ends. Sharepoint doesn’t support tags without an add-on, and then the tags are only applied to certain parts of the site – not to bookmarks.  In Sharepoint the bookmark belongs to a site, and you can’t search all bookmarks, check for commonly used tags, or find trends.  It’s just a link on a page. So can you store bookmarks on Sharepoint? Sure. Is Sharepoint a suitable platform for social bookmarking? Not even close. There are some free add-on tools to let you build in some lists and web parts but is that what you want for an enterprise platform? The core features should be in the product, not a set of after thoughts.

How about Communities or Groups?  This is one place Sharepoint has some rich features.  Unfortunately it fails to weave the content together within a community, or provide a way to surface up content to a global level.  Content in a group should come in the form of blogs, bookmarks, forums, and more. When those things are all tagged you can navigate through the group easily.  Sharepoint doesn’t provide tags, or any easy way to search across many sites (I do hear some people have success with global search of textual content in 3.0).  How about show me all forum entries and bookmarks tagged with “coffee”? Sharepoint doesn’t support tagging or the navigation and search mechanisms for it. Social software systems for the enterprise must feature a great meta-data driven search or they won’t be useful. Features like blogs should be allow authorship from both groups and individuals.

Another core feature is system news or activity where you can see a log of what’s happening in the entire company or your personal network. Just having a colleague or friend list is very useful if you can’t use it to navigate relevant content in the system. In Sharepoint assumes what is relevant is what’s in the site you are viewing. It doesn’t allow you can’t get feeds of what’s new by artifact type, or by your “friend list”. While all system components should feed the activity stream, a user should be able to insert something into the stream with a status update.  This can contain a note or link to offsite material, etc.  Sharepoint has no notion of status updates or an architecture to support features feeding into a single repository the user can view.  if you use FaceBook this is the Home/Newsfeed.

A great platform needs to be accessible.  In the 90’s that meant some type of COM or CORBA interface. Later, middleware interfaces morphed into web services.  Today RESTful interfaces that only require simple HTTP interactions (like Atom/Atompub) allow for mashups and are what people expect.  While Sharepoint does expose a lot of the underlying data via a web services model (I’ve been told it’s extensive) you’ll have to write a lot of REST based wrappers to enable easy interaction.  Using feeds to get data is tough with Sharepoint.  I’ve found you get a basic feed, but the options to get content by age, ranking, etc is non-existent. Even a list’s feed may be useful (could be somewhat static) but Sharepoint seems to treat most feeds like “news” and only give you recent content. Don’t skimp on the API.

I could go on and talk about using crowd sourcing for idea and news and other features.  I’m sure there is an add-on for this or that, and Microsoft has some new tidbit in the latest release.  Do you want to build a social software system on top of a groupware solution? Why? Find a social sofware solution that is evolving with each release, don’t build something on a platform with none of the infrastructure or mentality you need.

Summary & Other features I’d look for:

  • Groups of people can do the same things individuals can.  If a person can store bookmarks, or have a blog a group of people should have those features.
  • Profiles must be extendible, tag centric, and support personal networks.
  • Blogs should allow multiple authors.
  • Everything should feed an activity log the user can filter by their network, tags, etc.
  • Ratings & commenting should be pervasive features of any artifact.
  • Rich notifications scheme that uses feeds and email.
  • Don’t overlook crowd sourcing features.
  • Pre-Built widgets that can be leveraged with simple JavaScript.

If you are looking for a platform check out Sparta Networks, IBM Lotus Connections, and Jive Software.  I use Lotus Connections and think the 2.5 version fits much of what I want in a platform. Don’t bother flaming me, it’s simply my experience and opinion.  If you don’t like it go find a blog that agrees with your thinking and enjoy it (and have a cup of coffee too).