Perhaps not surprisingly, when I talk to clients about social tools, a social network is not their only focus. Typically, they have more common needs like sharing of corporate link on a homepage and the display of news articles that shouldn’t move down the activity stream over the day. It’s common intranet “stuff.” That means that with IBM’s Connections product, we quickly got into conversations of how to make the Connections homepage into an intranet or on how we would take the current corporate intranet homepage and inject Connections content. Neither are too difficult. You have even more options with the recent announcement of Connections 4. The latter could be fairly easy given the prevalence of RSS feeds in Connections.
However, through @StuartMcIntyre, I found the atcollaborationtoday site which highlights a German firm’s unique approach to extending IBM Connections with more traditional web content management capabilities to try and make Connections a slam dunk for an intranet. It’s an interesting slideshare. They focus on adding:
- Default homepage for intranet
- Adding multi-level navigation hierarchies for content
- News that stays on top
- News with summaries and thumbnails
- Link lists
- Simple content creation
It’s not mind blowing but it does make it easy to extend Connections if that’s the way you want to go.
Screenshot of Time to Act Extension for IBM Connections…in German
