IBM Lotus Connections

Lotus Connections 3.0 is well developed for Enterprise Communication. It offers an enterprise wide blog-platform on which every user can maintain personal blogs and participate in a group blog. All standard functionality for blogs is provided, including light publishing workflows, moderation, trackbacks and comments management. A blog can be created as single or multi author blog and three different themes can be chosen. Lotus Connections 3.0 has a new blog editor which makes it easier to author blog entries and enhance them with pictures and videos. Auto-save saves your in-progress work and reminds you when you have unsaved work so you can resume editing. On every blog, similar entries are suggested automatically and topic-related links may be displayed prominently in the sidebar. The discussion forum within communities is simple but well structured. It is possible to subscribe to an RSS feed of a thread and receive notifications in case of new comments. Moreover Connections enables users to communicate their current status and guests to leave a message on “the board” which is a publicly visible guestbook on each profile.

Originating from the famous IBM bluepages and thus equipped with more than 10 years of experience with virtual networking, the profile feature is the most advanced part within Lotus Connections. It is business like functionally structured and contact information contains a freetext self-description, a profile guestbook and references to a user’s published content. Profiles can be tagged, display an employee in the organizational report chain and users may include external links for example to a LinkedIN profile or a personal blog. While all profiles can be visited, adding somebody else to one’s network requires approval. Probably the most important feature is the “business card” which displays profile and content information when hovering above a user’s name throughout the whole platform and in external applications, if integrated. Presence and instant messaging functionality can be added with Lotus Sametime. Lotus Connections 3.0 offers new social analytics which help the user to expand and connect with her network by widgets that recommend people, show things in common as well as the social path that links to a person. Lotus Connections includes an advanced people search, but entering keywords in the normal search will match experts already, due to the strong relation of content and person on the platform.

Though not explicitly supported, a project can be managed from one of the communities. Useful in that matter are activities (task & milestone management), files (file sharing space with version control), wikis (collaboration) and blogs (project blogs). While none of these services can compete with dedicated tools, they are valuable in their combination and good enough to coordinate team efforts. Especially task management is well-engineered as tasks can be grouped, hierarchically organized and enriched with comments, files and bookmarks. Very convenient is the function to generate a template from an existing activity which enables users to easily reuse standard task lists. With Lotus Connections Version 3.0 the file management has been improved with regard to update notification, collection in and adding to folders and the sharing of personal files within a community. Furthermore, with version 3.0 communities can be added to activities and access can be restricted to a subset of members as well as activities can be created for a community with a subset of members being owner, author or reader. As said before, Lotus Connections is not focusing on Project Management but a good enough solution to support it.

IBM stresses that Lotus Connections is an independent product and can be integrated with MS Office and SharePoint, but choosing Connections means getting a whole package of IBM because Connections is bound to the IBM Websphere Application Server (WAS). Lotus Connections 3.0 is a very mature social software suite but its full potential is unleashed in combination with Lotus Sametime (presence/IM), the IBM Websphere Portal (WPS), Lotus Quickr and Lotus Notes. Connections is a Java Application running in the WAS environment and works with various databases like DB2, MS SQL and Oracle. Scaling, clustering, backup and restoration are well handled by the WAS but need rather extensive knowledge for configuration. Lotus Connections is available in 25 languages and can be accessed via the mobile browsers of Nokia phones (S60 platform) and iPhones (Safari). For Blackberrys, a special interface has been developed by RIM and IBM.

Lotus Connections supports Single Sign On (SSO) and can be integrated with a range of LDAP Servers including Microsoft’s Active Directory and Tivoli Directory Server. Access controls are mostly just public or private and a definition of user roles needs a complicated integration with the Websphere Portal Server (WPS). Backup and restoration are covered by the Websphere Application Server (WAS) in which Connections is deployed but there is no notion of content life-cycle management or other archiving.

In the beginning IBM handled most implementations by themselves or relied on IBM Global Services for consultancy services, but recently they started to include more partners in the promotion and implementation of Connections 3.0. The corporation can leverage its well established global partner channel but with Connections being a rather new product, social software expertise among partners is only scarcely available. IBM has all the resources to provide good support for their products and after some initial difficulties, IBM seems to be committed to Lotus Connections and has invested stronger in support and services around the product. The online documentation of Lotus Connections is one of the best among social software vendors. A very handy offering for people who want to get hands on experience with the Lotus Connections 3.0 is the ability to test it online in the IBM greenhouse.