What’s coming in IBM Connections? At Lotusphere 2012 IBM laid its plans for Connections in a general session. Of course, they had a disclaimer that the product is still under development, so these features may change by the time the final product is released.
The theme for the new version include:
- Social platform evolution
- Need to streamline work
- Anytime, anywhere access
- Prioritize what’s important
- Consistent integrated experience
- Enhanced communities for teams
- Share across group of people
- Support different groups
- Share and manage across teams
- Business to consumer
New features list:
- Integrate 3rd party applications more easily using open social gadgets and a new content aggregator. Here you can use applications directly from the stream, such as update a task, view a SAP service report and update it, etc. Also supports hash tags in the stream.
- You can take actions directly from the activity stream without switching context.
- Streamlined and consistent user experience for navigation and tools
- You can share content wherever you are in the system using a share link. This can include sharing files too.
- Email integration let’s me view and respond to email right inside Connections. Calendar access is there too.
- Reports now show user analytics in each community, not just at an overall level.
- You can also creat custom reports
- Enhancements for community teams:
- Community can have an activity stream
- Includes a calendar for central planning of team events
- The calendar is available from Notes and Outlook
- You can email into a new discussion forum
- Files can now be locked for editing and you can upload/download multiple files
- Groups can now be assigned to communities so you don’t have to add individual members
- You can catalog all team based collaboration sites you use so you can go to one place – Connections – to keep track of everything.
- Business to consumer features:
- Supports targeted collaboration between suppliers, customers or employees
- Say there is a discussion on the web about your company, you can bring that discussion into Connections. This is done though a browser plugin.
- Advanced Portal Integration includes community pages in portal.
- Community content can be included with other portlets
- The page on portal scopes Connections down to a specific community
- Improved SEO
- Provides consistent tagging and rating between Porttal and Connections
- Mobile now includes a hybrid application that can take advantage of native features like camera, location based checkin, profiles into address book.
- The microbrowser now includes a rich text editor on mobile devices
- Advanced file integration with windows like WebDAV, but better.
- Social aspects of the file is included so you can comment, see who’s using it etc.
- You can edit files right in line, so you don’t have to download it first and then upload it.
