IBM Lotus® Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers.
Most of us have used social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. They are simply huge successes for millions of users keeping in touch and sharing each others livfes. These sites are great for keeping in touch with friends and families however you probably wouldn't want to use them to store corporate information or to collaborate with your business partners.
Social Networking for Business
That is where Lotus Connections comes in. Think of it as the MySpace for the enterprise! It has all of the features we expect of social networking software but has the requirements demanded by enterprise and business.
ISW is working with our clients to explore the benefits of Lotus Connections. The power of connections is really in the content. By allowing employees, business partners, and customers to create their own profiles, blog about topics they are interested in, tag websites using Dogear, and join communities, organisations can quickly capture knowledge and expertise that used to be in peoples heads. With Lotus Connections your business networks can quickly find you when they need your expertise or you can find an expert in a topic that is important to you.
A great example of the power of Connections is the Dogear feature. Dogear allows users to share bookmarks that they would have only had in their favourites list in the past. ISW has found that it is often the case that when you are searching for some information that someone in the organisation has already been looking for the same knowledge. By searching your Lotus Connections site, often a bookmark that someone has tagged using Dogear will be exactly the information that you are looking for. The fact that they already found it and thought it worthy of being tagged with Dogear often means that the quality of the link is very high! This is the power of social networking for business. We start to leverage each others knowledge and expertise.
Check out the video of Connections in action.
So if you would like more information on Lotus Connections solutions please Contact Us and we would be happy to help.
Home Page
The Lotus Connections home page provides you with a consolidated, customizable overview of your social network. Using the home page you get an overview of your social network and you can rearrange the layout to suit your preferences.
Profiles
Profiles are the part of Lotus Connections that helps you quickly find the people you need by searching across your organization using keywords to identify expertise, current projects, and responsibilities. You can find people based on things like the person's name, their organization, location, reporting structure and interests. An integrated directory and expertise location engine, Lotus Connections profiles help you identify and work with key people who have specific knowledge or strategic business relationships. Profiles let you tap into the knowledge capital within your organization, and makes it easy to establish new business contacts.
Communities
Communities helps people who share a common interest to collaborate by exchanging and sharing information or interacting with one another via their Web browser, IBM Lotus Sametime, and email software. And a Community can take advantage of all the other parts of Lotus Connections in the same way that an individual user can — for example, Communities can be discovered the same way people are discovered. And communities can have their own bookmarks (discoverable via Dogear), and a community can have its Activities.
Dogear
Save, organize and share bookmarks; discover bookmarks that have been qualified by others with similar interests & expertise. Dogear gives people a better way to manage their own bookmarks as well as share, subscribe and search the community's bookmarks. Dogear makes it easier than ever before to share information and accelerate innovation. With Dogear, you can discover where people get their information. You go straight to information that a member of your community has already vetted and found appropriate and useful.
Blogs
Blogs help you connect with people - whether you know them or not, whether they are inside or outside your enterprise. They help you build communities of shared interest. They give each person in the organization a voice. Because blogging is as natural as writing an email, you can share your unique perspective and expertise — and solicit feedback — without worrying about filling up everyone's inbox.
Activities
Activities help you organize your work, plan next steps, and invite members of your professional networks to help execute your everyday deliverables, faster. You can organize Activities into sections. For example, you might organize the the activity for a meeting with sections for the logistics, meeting presentations, meeting agenda, key todos, etc. You can create and name the sections and then save the activity as a template for reuse. An activity's data entry form can be customized — rename the fields and add new fields to match the your unique business requirements.