May 26th – Sametime Mobile strategy and solutions

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Sametime+Mobile+Strategy&iso=20110526T12&p1=43&ah=1

June 9th – Lotus Notes Traveler Mobile strategy and solutions

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Lotus+Notes+Traveler+Mobile+Strategy+and+Solutions&iso=20110609T12&p1=43&ah=1
 

Audio Web Conference Information
1. Go to the URL – http://www.lotuslive.com/join?schedid=3336625
2. Enter your name and email address
3. Click the ‘Log In’button

Connect with other community members here on all things mobile
Work with the IBM design team to help improve our mobile product
Share your mobile experience and expertise
Help the Information Development team expand and improve technical content for mobile products, including product documentation. 

How to join?
In order to join the Mobile sub-community, you must first be a member of the User Experience Design and Information Community, on Lotus Greenhouse. Follow the instructions here, under “How to join the community”.
Once you have joined the community, or if you are already a member, do this to join the Mobile subcommunity:

On the left-hand navigation panel in the UX Community, under the Subcommunities heading, click on the link “Special interest: Mobile”.
Click the “Join this community” button in the upper right-hand side of the page.

This post originally appeared on the blog of forbes and its written by Kevin Cavanaugh Vice president, Business and Technical Strategy,IBM Collaboration Solutions.

The document as we know it — static and one-sided — has disappeared.

Documents today are no longer stand-still and no longer offer only one view. The old model doesn’t work for today’s social and always-connected business. Business communication has evolved to become more fluid, dynamic and collaborative and is now an integral part of business processes. And the concept of a document (whether that be text, spreadsheet, presentation or a hybrid approach) is still one of the critical outputs of many businesses.

The key is to help organizations break free of the outdated model, where the document is static, monolithic and tangential, to the more natural collaborative communication flow. And, more importantly, businesses across the world are looking for options to break free from huge fees and upgrade charges just to be able to access and edit content created and owned by that organization.

Because of this, we are seeing a major disruption in the field of office productivity software. Over the past 10-15 years, we saw what could be considered a monopoly around office productivity software. As a result, the marketplace of customers and solution providers stagnated. In early digital days, every word processor had its own unique format and because of this, interoperability across applications was poor. Document interchange initially was via printed copies. But with the rise of networked desktop, collaboration occurs electronically, not via paper. This opened the door to an interoperability crisis. But do we all have to use the same applications?

Thankfully, no.

We are moving towards a model that offers low-cost acquisition, coupled with high value and high collaboration around a document. Standards evolution, including the advances around ODF – Open Document Format – and document interchange; alternative forms of communication (email, IM, tweets, blogs); cloud delivery models for business applications; growth in smart, mobile devices; and economic pressures, are all converging to apply pressure to the status quo of documents. IBM Lotus Symphony, Apple iWork, OpenOfficederivatives, and other alternatives to Microsoft Office are viable office productivity suite alternatives, work well in businesses, and do not carry the same exorbitant costs and renewal fees. Additionally, cloud alternatives like Zoho, Google Docs, LotusLive Symphony andAcrobat.com are challenging the very notion of requiring desktop-based software to be productive in creating text, spreadsheet and presentation documents.

These other options have arrived due in part to the evolution of how people view “a document” and how people expect to collaborate and work together. Businesses are demanding these changes: it has become the norm to work in real time and be aware of updates as they occur. Vendors will have to meet these demands, and offer solutions to businesses that offer collaborative editing, assignment of tasks and management of comments.

We know that a static document does not meet this requirement. Businesses today do not accept the logic of being locked into one vendor’s office productivity software. With standards, users have more options to innovate. Documents go through many stages, from researching ideas, to outlines, to collaboration, to review, copy editing, approval and publication. No one tool is best for all stages of the document. Think of having several tools, each one adapted to a task, but interoperable at the same time.

Moving forward and breaking free of yesterday’s model is actually an easy process. A couple of initial steps will lead you in the right direction:

• Inventory the user population and the needs for office productivity software — whether it be casual, light or heavy. Which applications will be used most?
• Understand how dependent critical business applications and processes are on particular office productivity application vs. a particular file format.
• Thoroughly understand the licensing contracts with vendors — what do they really spend and what do you really get?
• And then analyze the alternatives and embark on small pilot projects.

A three to five-year office productivity and desktop strategy is critical as document creation factors into every businesses larger collaboration strategy. The business tasks we face have not changed much in 100 years, but the pressures companies operate under are different. Sure, we still develop plans and strategies, make decisions, develop and manufacture products, sell the products and track our finances. But we do these tasks under more time pressure – and increasingly in a global context. The technologies we use are also evolving. Because of this, it’s important (and easy) to start exploring options and uncovering the value new technology offers to your business.

Kevin Cavanaugh is vice president, Business and Technical Strategy,

The IBM Connections 3.0.1 Plug-in for Microsoft Office provides the following features:

• Add a Microsoft Office document to a Connections activity
• Create a To Do list from a Microsoft Word document for a Connections activity
• Add a Microsoft Word document to a Connections blog
• Search on a person’s name to view their Connections profile and insert their profile data into a Microsoft Word document
• Add a Microsoft Word document to a Connections wiki
• Add a link from a Microsoft Word document to Connections Bookmarks, or insert a link from Bookmarks into a Word document

The IBM Connections 3.0.1 Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook provides the following features:

• Add an Microsoft Outlook e-mail to an activity
• Create an e-mail as a To Do for an activity
• Search on a person’s name to view their business card, which lists a person’s contact information as well as expertise and interests
• Search for content in other Connections services such as Bookmarks, Communities, Blogs, and Activities
• Enhanced menu and ribbon support
• Extend the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector to provide the following Connections social capabilities:
  • Add people to your network and sync with Outlook contacts (e.g., photo, profile details)
  • View your network from your Outlook client
  • View all interaction you share with a colleague in your network, including e-mail, attachments, meetings, and feeds

Note: This plug-in requires Outlook Social Connector version 1.1 or higher. If you have not already done so, you must upgrade the default version of OSC for your Microsoft Office application, or install it for the first time. For information on Outlook Social Connector and instructions on how to download the correct software, see this OSC article on the Microsoft web site.

The IBM Connections 3.0.1 Plug-in for Microsoft Windows allows you to add files from Windows Explorer to a Connections activity.
The IBM Connections 3.0.1 Plug-in for Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows supports:

• IBM Lotus Connections 2.5
• IBM Lotus Connections 3.0
• IBM Connections 3.0.1
• Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, 2010 (32-bit) Professional or higher
• Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 (32-bit) Professional or higher
• Microsoft Windows XP SP3 (32-bit), Windows Vista (32-bit), Windows 7 SP1 (32-bit, 64-bit toleration)

https://greenhouse.lotus.com/plugins/plugincatalog.nsf/assetDetails.xsp?action=editDocument&documentId=B725B33D4CFB3C61852577B60056A406

The people over at OpenNTF has built yet another rely cool demo for how to use X-pages, this time they are leveraging the Social Business Toolkit.

Read the tutorial here

You will also:

• Gain Insight into critical business issues and emerging technologies
• Improve business and technical planning with expertise and guidance gained from in-depth presentations
• Test-drive the latest technologies during hands-on training sessions
• Take advantage of onsite certification testing
• Learn about the latest products and expert solutions at the Product Expo
• Discuss product strategy and technical directions with IBM Product and services architects
• Participate in communities of interest through roundtable topic discussions, birds-of-a-feather sessions and panel forums.

Read more and register

Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, CIO of Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising explains why they have decided to go with Lotuslive

A rely cool presentation form one of my colleagues in the Tiger Team – Ted Stanton.

The latest version of the Connections product is now available for download: 3.0.1 only . If my math is correct, this is the 10th major release for the product in the last 4 years and it comes only 130 days since our last release which was 3.0.

So what’s new in 3.0.1? Tons! Here’s a recap of what was announced at Lotusphere and is now available:

Media Gallery for sharing and viewing media in a community
The Media Gallery feature permits community members to upload and share images and videos for viewing within a community. The Media Gallery page displays thumbnails of the multimedia content in your community’s media gallery. You can see who uploaded a file and when the file was last updated. You can also see how many people have downloaded or commented on a file, and preview photos or videos using the gallery previewer.

Ideation Blog for sharing, commenting, and voting on ideas in a community
The Ideation Blog feature is designed to help make it simpler for community members to post new ideas, vote on them, and turn them into projects. A community owner can choose to add the Ideation Blog feature to their community. Community members can then post new ideas to the Ideation Blog. As new ideas are added, community members can post comments and cast votes for their favorite ideas. An Activity can be created for promising ideas so that work can proceed on turning the idea into reality. This feature can be used, for example, to gather suggestions from customers on how to improve products.

New community content moderation capabilities
Community owners can moderate content using pre-moderation or post-moderation. Pre-moderation enables a community owner to approve or reject content before it appears in the community. With post-moderation, a community member can flag content as inappropriate. This action sends a notification to the community owner who can then review the flagged item and take appropriate action by quarantining the content or dismissing the flag.

Integration with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories
The ECM integration allows users to store, access, and edit documents residing in FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Manager from within a Community.

Integration with IBM Lotus® Sametime® server
The IBM Lotus Sametime server integration allows users to collaborate in real time from IBM Connections.

Suzanne Livingston has created a demo that shows all the new features.

You have several options when installing 3.0.1:

• Upgrade directly from 2.5
• Apply as a fixpack on top of 3.0
• Install 3.0.1 directly (ie. if you are new to Connections, there’s no need to install 3.0 first)

I installed 3.0.1 last week and the process went super smooth. One thing that caught me was that I forgot to configure the AJAX proxy for my ECM server. So don’t forget to do that after you install 3.0.1.
If you want to learn more, I’ll be presenting about Connections 3.0.1 and its extensibility options at IBM’s Impact#ibmimpact conference in Las Vegas next week. Both of my sessions are on Wednesday. I’ll also be manning the Exceptional Work Experience ped. Hope to see you there!
So go on and download and enjoy!

This IBM Redguide™ publication provides information about IBM Social Business and includes details about the business need and the value of transformation to a social business. It presents a high-level Social Business component diagram, highlights key capabilities, and includes customer case studies that exemplify how some of these capabilities can be applied.

Table of contents
Executive overview
The business need for Social Business
The business value of Social Business
The core concepts that drive Social Business
The technology of Social Business
Social Business Agenda
How to get started
Summary

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4746.pdf