There are 5 themes in the Lotus Connections product suite:

• Profiles
• Communities
• Dogear
• Activities
• Blog

All of which are customisable, and all – in the spirit of Creature Comforts – very turn off and onable. We know this because only the invited great and good have access to the Blog component on the special Lotusphere pre-beta we’ve been invited to use. This is partly because I suspect that setting up a pre-beta for 7500 users has potential issues for the folks having to admin the temporary Domino and Connections servers down here in Orlando.

Profiles

OK, we’ve been talking about this at work for some time and have a project underway at the moment that is looking to provide something similar for a partial coverage of our staff. We’ve hung back from developing significant applications to deliver and drive the profiles precisely becuase we were expecting something along the lines of the profiles module to be delivered sometime soon. IBM have made considerable noise about their own internal use of ‘Blue Pages’ as a ‘People Finder’ on steroids.

Communities

Communities alows folks tocreate ad-hoc groups based around subjects they are interested in. All taggable – just like Facebook / Bebo Groups etc., but for grown-ups

Dogear

I’ve talked about Dogear previously, when it was standalone as an internal alphaworks product at Watson Research Lab, and refered to by the ACM. Dogear is basically del.icio.us for the Enterprise, but is well embedded with the other areas of Connections, particularly with…

Activities

Right, now this *is* new (well, sort of – you could argue that it’s an extension of a Task List paradigm, but that would be doing a particular disservice to this piece of functionality).

The one issue I need to get to the bottom of here with some of the Lotus folk is where Activities fits with Websphere Process Server.

…

OK. had a chat with them, and it seems that we are talking ad-hoc activities here, not formal business methods. I think I can find a way of differentiating between the two when we need to present this out to people.

Blogs

Shouldn’t really need any explanation really.

So the potential of Connections is pretty huge for businesses prepared to invest in the improved Notes / Domino / Connections environment. We’ve seen countless demos of how seamlessly they all integrate and can be used to organise work. It all looks good.

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Posted: January 26th, 2007 under AJAX, Business, Collaboration Tools, Information Management, Portal.
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v6.0 on general release tomorrow. 6.0.1 in summer. Trial is available on the IBM main downloads site. Samples and demos on http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus

Posted: January 22nd, 2007 under Collaboration Tools, Development, Lotusphere.
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Travelling to Orlando on Friday for this year’s Lotusphere event at the Walt Disney World Resort. This year’s conference is pretty important in Lotus terms as it marks the (near) arrival of Domino 8.0 (a.k.a. Hannover).

Whilst new product announcements are never all that thrilling (unless they directy effect your stock value), this year’s announcements will mark out the next generation collaboration platform from IBM, and with it closer alignment with Social and Activity based computing.

Posted: January 19th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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