News

Latest news from the Let’sConnect user group

09/032015

Sponsor Highlight: TrustSphere

As we are approaching April 16, the date for the first day of the Social Connections conference, we will be highlighting all our sponsors. This event could not happen without their support and we are delighted to have them on board as each one plays a really important role in helping to fund the event but also as a member of our community.

So we present you one of our returning sponsors for Social Connections, Gold sponsor for Boston: TrustSphere

TrustSphere is the recognized market leader in Relationship Analytics having pioneered a next-generation approach to analyzing both internal and external communication patterns across an organization and synthesizing these to provide actionable insights.

Clients who implement our solutions, which are primarily based on their existing corporate data, improve visibility and collaboration amongst management and customer teams.

Collaboration leads to an improvement in performance and productivity across multiple lines of business. The insights gained have a direct impact on both customer experience and business performance.

Visit trustsphere.com for more details.

04/032015

What should you expect at Social Connections 8?

News boston, expectation, prague, soccnx by Wannes Rams

Every Social Connections event has been different – after all, we’ve hosted every one in a new country so far! So the culture, the language and the surroundings definitely influence the kind of atmosphere and interactions that take place. That’s the joy of being a truly international user group!

However, there are certainly common themes…

A gathering of like-minded and passionate advocates of Social Business technologies, collaborative approaches and the use of IBM solutions.
Awesome content from internationally renown speakers, plus some case studies that you’ll hear nowhere else.
Hearing the latest product news – from IBM and from third-party vendors. We’ve been thrilled to hear from IBM product managers at almost every event – including Heidi Ambler, Luis Benitez, Kramer Reeves and in Boston, Suzanne Livingston.
A mix of business and technical… From high-level strategy and user adoption tips right down to geeky sessions on TDI assembly lines and widget development. The team always aim for a broad mix of deep content.
An atmosphere of openness and sharing. Attendees come with an attitude of wanting to make the most from the event, the opportunities and to be ready for meeting others that may start as strangers but will likely become friends in the long-run.
We weave ‘Social’ with ‘social’… This is about having fun, making connections, and re-energising ourselves and each other for the hard work ahead!

That’s a lot of words, right? Well as ever, a picture paints a thousand words, and a video… Well that must be a million, right?

So here’s our overview video from Social Connections VI, the event that took place in Prague in June 2014…

Like what you see? Well there’s no time like the present! Register for Social Connections 8 today!

02/032015

Why should you attend Social Connections 8?

News boston, quotes, registrations, soccnx by Jan Valdman

In the few days since we announced our fantastic agenda for Social Connections 8 in Boston, the number of registered attendees has almost doubled!

For this event, we have asked each attendee why they have registered. Here are some of the recent answers that have been given:

Newbies

I’m a new user and would like to know more about Connections.
This will be my first one. Very excited to attend after seeing the great value presented at the previous 7.
I’ve never attended previously but hope to hear insights and feedback from other customers about their successes and challenges with social, what use cases they have, and their adoption strategy.

Learning & Education

Our organization is deploying Connections 5 in 2015. I’m looking for ways to make the business side of the deployment a success.
My group is responsible for support of Connections and helps with user adoption. I would like to hear how other companies are using Connections and what worked best in their organization.
I want to learn what clients are doing
I train business students to work effectively with Connections
Learn more how Social Business trends are driving companies today
Build and extend their skills and knowledge, work in real collaboration between BP and Customers
Plans fell through the last year to attend and me and my team have a strong focus on developing social solutions.
Learn. Meet up with friends.
Learn new things! 🙂
To Network with individuals who share the common passion for Enterprise Social Networking and to keep up to date with latest developments in this domain.
speaking
We are implementing Connections and I want to be better informed about the best way it should be used.
I am looking forward to meeting with customers and understanding the community’s input on our user experience direction.
Thought leadership and Connections
I am most interested in developing additions to IBM Connections

Keep with Trends & Future Evolution

I manage IBM Connections at my company. [I need to u]nderstand the technology, the road map, and network with industry champions.
Hear interesting thoughts and visions about social software – and the location begs for information about future products and developments following
The location leads to expect information about the future of the IBM social products and about new products/thinkings
Keep up with trends and deep diving
Keep up on where IBM is going and some deep diving

Speaking/Sharing

As a IBM Premier Business Partner we are involved in many social collaboration projects. I want to share experiences with the social collaboration community.
I hope to be speaking and also attending technical sessions.
I was a speaker at Social Connections 7
To share knowledge and learn
Share Connections knowledge, network, attend other presentations
Learn from this wonderful community and share my experiences!
An opportunity to meet others and share my story in the hopes that it inspires others.

The Community & Networking

Excited to reconnect with this community and learn more about social adoption.
To meet all the great people here! 🙂
Getting to know more people in the IBM Connections area
Meet customers and how they are being successful at getting value from Connections.
Networking, Education, Visibility
Networking, Latest technical infos on IBM Connections, Speaker 🙂
Obviously to build network 🙂 I hope to see more deep technical session
Connect with customers and partners
Networking, new insights, learning
Social relationship, technical session
I want to meet clients and partners
To meet like minded people.
I was a speaker and attendee at Social Connections 7

And the last but not least:

Because its the best event in the world regarding the product IBM Connections !
To meet all the people!

So, what is your reason to attend?

25/022015

The Social Connections 8 agenda has arrived!

News agenda, boston, soccnx by Lars Samuelsson

We are so super excited! Today we are unveiling the Social Connections 8 agenda for our event in Boston.

As you know from our previous announcements, we have keynote presentations by Suzanne Livingston and Ed Brill. We couldn’t be more excited by these well-known IBM big-hitters (and hugely respected supporters of the community) headlining our conference content.

That said, we have been absolutely blown away by the response to our call for abstracts, and can now formally declare that we will host a grand total of more than 60 sessions over the two days, a total of 57 speakers, including an incredible 17 IBM Champions.

We feel this is our strongest lineup to date, which feels extremely pleasing with our first trip to the US, kicking it off with a bang!

We’re covering everything from Case Studies and the brand new ‘Future of Work’ track, through to the nitty gritty details of how to configure your IBM Connections environment or start developing for the platform. Even better, we are thrilled to debut a new ‘Design’ track, staffed exclusively by IBM’s awesome design staff from the labs in the Boston area. In short, there is something for everyone, and I can honestly say that we are so so proud to present this to you guys.

We’re not going to promote any specific sessions right now, apart from a call to check out the sponsor sessions. After all, without their help we would have no chance of putting all this together!

If you haven’t taken a look at the agenda yet, do it right now! It’s here!

And if you like what you see… Register now!

17/022015

Two months…

News boston, soccnx by Wannes Rams

Social Connections 8 is approaching fast! In fact it feels as though the pace is picking up with every day that passes!

With this being the first Social Connections event that has been run in the USA, the team is working hard to pull together the very best experience that it can.

What does that mean? Well we’ve been busy on:

The abstract submission process. We’ve been delighted to have received a great number of abstracts submitted for this event than any we’ve run before. We’re also thrilled at the range and depth of the topics that we’ve seen, as well as hearing from some awesome speakers both old and new. Despite this, we’ve extended the deadline a teeny bit (by one week to next Sunday, the 22nd February). Why? We would love some additional sessions in specific tracks – Spotlight, the Future of Work and Case Studies. The team will review all abstracts that are submitted, but those are the ones we’d most like to add to the very balanced agenda that we’re pulling together. Submit your abstract now!
Planning the agenda. Whilst the final set of sessions are yet to be confirmed, we’ve already started to add key sessions to the schedule… If you’re waiting to see the agenda before confirming your own attendance, it will be published early next week.
The gala reception. Those that have attended previous Social Connections events will know that we really lavish a lot of focus and attention on our receptions – from a Welsh castle, to the Guinness factory in Dublin, at the lakeside in Zürich, a villa overlooking Prague (and the fireworks), to the gallery in Stockholm. Therefore we know we have a lot to live up to! We’re busy confirming the venue and arrangements for the Boston reception (with complimentary attendance for all attendees), and should have some news to share very soon.
Recruiting sponsors. We sometimes feel that we don’t say this enough… We could not run this event without our sponsors – they are absolutely key to funding the event and enabling us to deliver a conference that meets your needs. (For background, the small fee that we now charge to attend the conference barely covers the daytime catering, let alone the reception, the signage, the materials, etc. etc.) Therefore we hugely value their support for Social Connections, and are delighted that IBM, Kudos, GoodMeeting, TimeToAct, Ephox and Panagenda have already committed to sponsoring and exhibiting at the Boston event.
Planning some great ‘extra-curricular’ activities. Whilst formal sessions are key to any conference agenda, we feel that the really great interactions often take place outside the auditorium or breakout rooms. Therefore we’re ideating hard to try to provide a really great mix of activities at the conference. From SpeedSponsoring to unconference sessions, to opportunities for feedback on designs, there will be plenty of chances to get up close and personal with key IBMers, speakers, and IBM Champions.

So, with just 58 days to go, there really is no excuse! Register for Social Connections 8 today!

keep-calm-and-submit-your-abstract-featured

05/022015

10 days…

News abstracts, schedule, sessions, soccnx by Wannes Rams

It is just 10 days until the Social Connections 8 call for abstracts slides ever so tightly shut.

Yes, you have just ten short days in which to submit your great ideas for sessions at the upcoming IBM Social Business user group, which takes place in Boston on 16th and 17th April. We’re looking to select 20-30 really tip-top sessions to fill out our provisional event schedule – we’ve had some really super abstracts so far (thanks go to everyone that has submitted) but we’d really love more!

For the first time at Social Connections, we will be offering a selection of session durations:

15 minutes – solely for Spotlight sessions (see below)
30 minutes – the standard session length, used for ~75% of our session slots. You will increase your chance of being selected by opting for this session length
60 minutes – for in-depth technical sessions, where it is difficult to get to grips with the content in 30 minutes

We are inviting sessions in the following tracks:

Administration – sessions relating to administering Social Business platforms. It could be the design and build of infrastructure, upgrading, managing users, migrating to the cloud, integration with other services or platforms etc. Sessions relating to cloud, hybrid or on-premise infrastructures are welcome! (30-minute and 60-minute slots)
Case Study – sessions focused on telling the story of existing Social Business projects. We love case studies! And the more honest the better! Ideally these sessions should feature at least one speaker from the company that uses the platform, but they could be accompanied by a vendor or partner. (30-minute slots only)
Development – how and why to develop for these services. We’d love you to share your tips, techniques and experience of developing solutions or applications, where you might hit issues, and how you overcome them. (30-minute and 60-minute slots)
Future of Work – new for this conference, sessions in this track should explore topics around the area of improving the productivity of individuals and organisations through the use of social technologies. (30-minute slots only)
Management – sessions that take a higher-level view of the issues, challenges and opportunities that surface when deploying social platforms. (30-minute slots)
Spotlight – also new for Social Connections 8, this track is designed to give new (or experienced) speakers the chance to present a short session on a topic of their choice. Think of it as being akin to TED talks, but within the framework of Social Connections. You can choose to use a presentation deck or not, to prepare earnestly or to speak from the heart, the choice is yours. What we’re after is insight, interest and passion – the rest is up to you! (15-minute slots only)
Sponsor – for those organisations that are sponsoring the event at Gold level or above, there is the option to submit a Sponsor session for the conference. (30-minute slots only)

The theme for the conference is ‘Beyond the Enterprise‘, so you may wish to give some thought to how your topic relates to this. You can take it any way you like, e.g. bridging internal and external communities, working with partners, making Social Business relevant to small organisations, creating non-work-related social communities, and so on. It’s not mandatory for the abstract to relate to the theme, but obviously it would be even better if it did.

The deadline for submitting an abstract is Sunday 15th February 2015, so you need to get your proverbial skates on!

Some advice that might help:

If you’re an experienced speaker and want to submit your session that you presented at IBM ConnectED, or will present at InterConnect, Engage or ICS UG, then we’d be happy to accept it. We’d just advise that you might tweak it to suit the session lengths described above. Also, we do try to have a really interactive atmosphere at Social Connections, so make sure you leave some space for questions and feedback from the audience.
If you’re new to speaking at events such as user groups and conferences, please don’t let that put you off! We all have to start somewhere, and we’d love to support you make your debut at Social Connections 8! You might want to consider submitting for the Spotlight track mentioned above, which would give you an informal 15-minute slot to cover your case-study, concept, solution or idea. If you need longer, but feel unsure about delivering a session alone, please reach out to the Social Connections team – either one of us would be delighted to assist or co-present, or else we can recommend another speaker that might be ideal for your session.
We’re always very keen to receive submissions for the case-study track, so please give some thought to whether you can tell your own organisation’s story regarding adoption of Social Business technologies. Typically case study sessions get really high ratings from attendees, as well as comments that suggest how useful they’ve been in assisting their own organisation’s journey.
Please consider submitting multiple abstracts for different topics and tracks. The selection team will be trying to create a balanced and informative schedule for the two days of the conference, therefore we may (for example) have a surplus of great management sessions, where a quality administration abstract would have been selected.
Submit ASAP! We’ve already highlighted a number of speakers on our site and will be selecting a few key sessions throughout the remaining few days of the process to list on our site. If you have a great idea for a session, get it to us right away…

So, ten days and counting! Hope to read your abstract(s) very soon!

02/022015

Have you registered yet? We’re only two and a half months away!

News boston, registration, soccnx by Lars Samuelsson

Hi guys,

Hope everyone who went to ConnectED got back safe, and everyone else, i hope you are safe anyways!

Now that ConnectED is over, it’s time to focus on Boston and Social Connections 8. The team is still super psyched to get this show over to the US for the first time, and we wanna see you there! Listening in to some of the buzz in the corridors at ConnectED, there is interest in attending too!

We know that you are waiting for a schedule with some sessions, we’ve been working hard for you to get it as soon as possible, and now it’s here! Please head over and check it out at the schedule page. We also got the speakers page up, check it out! We will update them both with details as soon as we have them confirmed.

Do you have questions on attending? Please contact us at @soccnx on Twitter or like our Facebook page, that way you can also stay up to date with what we have in store for you in April.

Oh, yes. Now that we’re through with ConnectED, we will once again kindly remind you to submit your abstracts. We got some real goodies in already, but are looking for more! Please, don’t be shy!

We’re also working on hammering out the details for the evening reception on thursday, so stay tuned for that. We promise, we’ll try to put it a bit closer than in Stockholm. (Yes, we saw the feedback).

Speaking of the feedback, it was lovely, and we’re really trying to take it all in, don’t be shy to tell us if there’s something you feel that we’ve missed, we wanna make this event as awesome as possible for everyone attending.

21/012015

Going to IBM ConnectED? So are we!

News ibmconnected, soccnx by Lars Samuelsson

Are you in the final prepping stages for your trip to Florida? I can somehow relate to that if that is the case.

There is a heavy snowfall over Stockholm and I must admit that Orlando sounds a lot more inviting, however, I would like to see the forecast pick up there as well!

From this…

to this… (yes!)

Anyways, what I was getting at is that we are going to Orlando, at least a few of the Social Connections team. Maria, Jan, Doug and (Lars) from the #soccnx team will be on hand in Orlando, running around, trying to be as social as possible and learning what’s up in the world of ICS, Social Business and the rest of the collaboration space.

For those in the Americas, you might be telling yourself that you’ve heard about this Social Connections event we’ve dragged across Europe for the last couple of years, but you’ve never had the opportunity to go as it’s quite a trip over the pond? Well, we are bringing it to you and to the USA for the first time this April! So we wanna ask you to come talk to us while at ConnectED, ask us questions, or just generally buzz around to get the feeling for what will surely be a memorable event in Boston this spring.

Like we always say at the start of each Social Connections event, come up, be social! We would love to inspire you to come to Boston with us.

Maria

Lars

Have a great week in Florida all of you who will attend, and see you there!

14/012015

IBM Connections feedback – What did you like/want/hate?

News features, feedback, product by Jan Valdman

During our last Social Connections event in Stockholm we introduced a new activity: all attendees were asked express their opinion regarding various features of IBM Connections.

The goal was simple – to aggregate independent feedback on the product by a defined group of people (we considered Social Connections VII attendees to be a well-defined group of experts and keen users).

The setup was also simple: there was a wall with well-known icons and a large number of post-it notes!

The idea behind this setup was to stimulate discussion and idea generation among the attendees in a natural, structured and convenient way with instant visibility. Although everyone could use the ideation blog at the IBM Greenhouse, only few of us have enough time to read through hundreds of post. So post-it notes worked better for our purpose!

User feedback provided during SOCCNX VII in Stockholm

We collected 111 color-coded notes, most of them (95) requesting new features. Here is what we learned:

The most discussed module was Files. It indicates that most collaboration scenarios are still file-centric and thus a file sharing functions are crucial to any ESN.
In second place there were Communities, Activities, Mobile and Search.
The least commented were Forums (they seem to be almost perfect ), Bookmarks (ehm, does anybody take them seriously?) and Blogs.
On multiple occasions people also asked for features already present in 5.0 or 4.5.x so it either means that they run on older versions (not so likely) or (most likely) that they are not aware on few functions or they can not find them easily.

Let as look at the most compelling comments for each modules:

Mobile apps

Multiple request for better search, search of all content and better support of multi-language content
Support for mentions
Ability to edit wiki
Better activities (IBM should be already working on this)
Ability to upload new version of files (not just share new file)
User-performed customization of the app (i.e. to turn off unnecessary features)

Homepage

More powerful filtering of activity stream (drill down by topics and people?)
Make it easier to follow certain topics
Ability to see what I like or liked
Ability to see what I follow or followed

Profiles

Ability to promote external user to internal and vice versa
Profile completeness indicator
Easier 3rd party integration for profile data (without TDI?)
Integration of network and e-mail contacts (with Notes?)

Files (+Docs)

Multiple comments on inconsistencies between community vs. personal files and folders (and libraries) + UX makeover to make it simple (KISS)
Make a file shareable with external users afterwards, share a file outside Connections
Convert Docs file back to Office format
Tag other’s files (even if I am not in editor role) to find them easily later by tags that make sense to me
Support more actions with multiple selected files (add tags, description, mark for sync)
Edit file description during upload/sharing
Enhance file viewer (more file formats, better display of office files with complex formating)

Communities

Ability to tag communities where I am not an owner
Suggest similar communities during creation(discourage users to create very similar communities)
Make surveys available out of box
Make community available for external users afterwards
Personalization of community landing page (persistent display state of widgets?)

Activities

Multiple requests of UX improvements or makeover
Demand for better overview of tasks (new views, filtering etc.)
Multiple comments on missing features in Connections Cloud
Multiple requests of integration between Connections tasks and Notes tasks

Blogs

Better skin in browser (mobile apps are much more cute after recent remake)
Better ideation blogs management

Forums

Support for mentions

Search

Type-ahead for everything (oh yes!!!!)
Search does not work well on Android

Wikis

Multiple general requests for better wikis
Support for permalinks
Import/export features (PDF, rtf)

Bookmarks

Ability to like and comment bookmarks (why is this still missing?)

Other

One consistent UI across all modules
Backup & restore of single content
Better support of 3rd party integration (i.e. XPages)
Ability to pin favorite content (are browse it later)
Ability to indicate security status of every piece of content (confidential, secret, under NDA….)
Multiple complains on cloud integration

Not all of the notes were easy to understand and some of them were really hard to read However, the overall impression was unambiguous so we can draw this conclusion:

In general, Connections users demand new or enhanced features across all the modules. There is no single point of pain in the products.
Many users demanded more intuitive and consistent UX across all the modules, web or mobile, on-prem and cloud. With the recent stress on design thinking in ICS, can we hope for early improvements?
Those who switch between cloud and on-prem complain about missing features which is a bit of surprise when compared to IBM’s stated cloud-first strategy.
IBM should focus the most on enhancements of Files, Activities, Wikis, Search and mobile experience.

Thank you all for your input and sharing your awesome ideas. To keep this post reasonably short, we can not mention every single post-it note. But don’t worry, we shared all submitted ideas in full details with Luis Benitez who promised to bring them to the development teams. Stay tuned for the next releases!

14/012015

Calling for abstracts – submit yours now!

News abstracts, sessions, soccnx by Lars Samuelsson

Hi everyone!

I know that we’re pushing ahead towards IBM ConnectED with insane speed, but this is a friendly reminder that we have a call for abstracts running for Social Connections 8 in Boston.

Do you have something super awesome that you wanna tell the world about IBM Connections, or Social Business as a concept? Send in an abstract now. We would love to have you do your presentation. This time around we have some different time slots to choose from. You can go 15, 30 or even up to 60 minutes if you got something extra inspiring for everyone to hear and see!

This is the first time ever we’ve run Social Connections in the US, and you have this amazing opportunity to be the first ones out, the pioneers! How the West was won, (I know it’s the East coast, but from our European point of view at least) and so on.

Remember this, most of you guys have a few flight hours getting to ConnectED, why not spend them planning your next event already?

Haven’t got anything yet?

Take your time during IBM ConnectED, get inspired, find something cool – something you want to share with the world and your peers, and write the abstract on the way home instead. We will close submissions on the 15th of February.

If you’re asking what’s in it for me? You’ll of course get all the awesome recognition and kudos from your peers, plus the opportunity to take part in our ‘Ask the Experts’ panel, you’ll receive complimentary admission to the event including the gala reception and be offered an invite to our exclusive VIP reception.

And for those that might be too shy to talk. Register for Social Connections 8 now, and we’ll see all of you in Boston on 16th and 17th of April!

Cheers!