Enterprise social networking tools like IBM Lotus Connections allow businesses to leverage social software features to improve collaboration. These tools provide communities, blogs, activities, profiles and more to help flatten business hierarchies and improve information sharing. They also integrate with existing applications like Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes. Lotus Connections provides social features while addressing enterprise issues like security and integration with existing systems. It allows improved collaboration both internally and with customers and partners through dynamic social networks.
2. Agenda
• Examples of Social Software on the Web
– Useful and not so useful
• The changing world of business
• Real Time Collaboration
• Enterprise Mashups
• Lotus Connections
• Questions
23. Social Networking is about collaboration not technology
• What is new is people being connected
• Technology can only ENABLE collaboration
• People CREATE collaboration
• Example
– Have Problem
– Find Expert
– Create Shared Team Space
– Invite expert to participate
– Expert says “No”
24. Business is changing - hierarchies are being flattened
From hierarchies… to networked hierarchies
Exploration & Production
Explorations
Williams
Drilling
Taylor
Production
Stock
Senior Vice President
Jones
G & G
Cohen
Petrophysical
Cross
Production
O’Brien
Reservoir
Shapiro
PaineSmith Andrews Moore
Hughes Miller
Ramirez
Bell
Cole
Hussain
Kelly
Sen
Paine
Smith
Moore
Hughes
Miller
Ramirez Bell
Cole
Hussain
Kelly
Sen
Cohen Jones
Cross
Taylor
Williams
Shapiro
O’Brien
Stock
Andrews
25. Evolutions in People Productivity
Proprietary Client/Server
Proprietary Document Formats
Multi-year Development Cycles
Focus on Email and Documents
Personal Productivity
Standalone Use
Focus on Authoring Tool
1995: Personal
Productivity
2000: Team
Productivity
2005:
Organizational
Productivity
• Relationships & Communities
• Collective knowledge
• Power of the network
• Open standards
• Speed
• Focus on People
26. Examples – Empowering LOB to deliver relevant information to
decision makers
• Retail
– Chairman – “Our Customer Satisfaction is the most important thing”
– Checkout Person – surly, disenfranchised, chewing gum on minimum wage
• Healthcare
– Trust Leader – “The Patient must get value for money”
– Nurse – can see all the inefficiencies and waste
• Manufacturing
– CEO – “We must drive productivity to maximise margin”
– Production worker – can see how to improve process to optimise
performance
27. Instant Messaging is the now the hub of communications for
many people
The problem has moved from how you communicate to who you
communicate with
• The next generation (kids) don’t use email
• They communicate with whoever is online
• Expertise Location - Profiles
• UC2 Universal Communication and Collaboration
29. Real Time Collaboration features
• Presence awareness
• Location awareness
• Secure chat
• eMeetings
• Shared whiteboarding
• Shared applications
• Video and Voice over IP
31. Email + C&S work fine within organisations
• Point to point communication
• Personal notifications
• Group scheduling
• Need to take it back to it’s core purpose – communication not
collaboration
• Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water!
32. Some Characteristics of social software technology
• Platform neutral
• Language neutral
• Hardware neutral
• Software neutral
• Client neutral
• Web 2.0 tends to be exclusively Browser based
33. What is missing when mapping these new paradigms to make
Enterprise 2.0?
• Security
• Perimeters
• Integration
• Single signon/authentication
• Offline support
• Etc…
• Many of these capabilities are already available in traditional
enterprise applications
34. How to mash up existing enterprise apps with new stuff
• Social Software does not necessarily replace the incumbent
software products – it enhances them
• Email with IM / Presence / Live Names
• RSS
• Blogs / Wikis
• Composite Applications
43. Introducing Lotus® Connections
Lotus Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be more effective and innovative by
building dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers
Communities
Blogs Dogear
Activities
Profiles
44. Microsoft® Office™IBM Lotus Notes® IBM Lotus Sametime®
IBM WebSphere® Portal Web UI
Web application
Browser bookmarks
Powerful activity
sidebar
Community broadcasts
Activities plugin
Portlet integrates any/all
services into portal
pages/sites
Post to activity
Extensibility
Feed readers
Business card
Mashups
REST APIs
Using Lotus Connections from your daily tools
Lotus Connections Services
45. Our experiences with social software at IBM
Communities
IBM Community Map hosts 700 communities. IBM Forums hold 36,000 entries.
Blogs
IBM’s BlogCentral hosts 27,300 weblogs (420 group blogs) with 62,000 entries and 60,000 comments, and 10,800 distinct tags.
Dogear
IBM’s internal Dogear system has 185,000 links from 3,425 users. One-third are intranet links and only 2.5% are private.
Activities
IBM’s internal Activities service has seen all content and usage statistics grow by 2.5x over the second half
of 2006 to 10,000 activities, 60,000 entries and 32,000 users.
Profiles
IBM’s internal BluePages application provided the basis for Profiles. BluePages holds 475,000 profiles and serves 3.5 million searches per
week. It is the hub of both user requests and all app authentication for IBM.
46. Lotus Connections on ibm.com or see our stand or the application lab
that immediately follows this session
www.ibm.com/lotus/connections
Latest product info, research, podcasts, and more
IBM Lotus Sametime is the solution that can best help you run your business in real time. Lotus Sametime has always provided instant, anytime access to people and information through three key concepts: Presence awareness. See, in advance, whether a person or application is available to collaborate, share information or take an action. Instant messaging. Converse in real-time with one or many people via text messages, with optional audio/video integration. Web conferencing. Share information, an application or an entire desktop. Engage in team white boarding.
When we set out to develop Lotus Connections, we had these ideas in mind. It’s social software for business that empowers people to be more effective and innovative by building dynamic networks of corworkers, partners, and customers. Lotus Connections consists of five services: Profiles is a “white pages” directory that helps you reach individuals. Profiles also forms a kind of hub for the other services, as we’ll see. Communities is a listing service for groups of people. It helps people organize around a common interest. The blog service allows indviduals and teams to blog, and attract readers who can then connect by commenting on their blogs. Dogear is a social bookmarking service. It makes it easy for people to organize bookmarks and share them with others as they work. And Activities is a simple collaboration service that helps individuals to organize their work and coordinate their collaborations with other people.
All of the Connections services provide a web interface and simple APIs, providing universal access and simple extensibility and embeddability. Beyond this, though, Connections includes a number of “on-ramps” that integrate the Connections services into the tools you already use. The type and depth of integration varies with what is most applicable given the tools and the Connections services. Its also important to note that all of these “plugins” and “on-ramps” are built using our own APIs, which are also available for partners and customers to use. The Notes 8 activity sidebar is perhaps the most powerful plugin, providing even some features beyond the web application via the benefits of the rich client platform of Notes. Activities and communities naturally integrate with Sametime – providing the ability to broadcast questions or information to a community and to find related activities or save a chat directly to an activity without leaving the chat window. The ability to post documents directly from Office to an activity streamlines the transformation of work from the document-centric world to the more natural activity-centric environment. The portal integration allows all of the services to be added to a portal page or composite application. The wiring and parameters supported by the Connections portlet allow the contents to be filtered by service, tag, user and other properties. For example, a composite application which manages a particular process can include the Connections portlet showing only activities with a particular tag, enabling the use of activity-centric computing specifically targeted to the application at hand. Universal and consistent support for feeds in all of the Connections services allows your favorite feed reader to connect to any or all of the services, showing, for example, a feed of new entries to your high priority activities, another feed off of a colleague’s bookmarks and another off of new blog entries with a particular tag. There are a variety of other integration points – simple bookmarklets for posting links as bookmarks, activity or community entries; the profiles contextual business card and so on. In addition, the simple atom-based REST API makes it simple to create all sorts of mashups .