With the release of IBM Connections 4.0 on 7th September comes a whole new experience in Social Collaboration inside an organizations. From our side, we have started on the upgrade process for moving our Connections installation to 4.0. While IBM Connections 4.0 has a whole lot of new features, whether the Connections Mail or the ability to upload multiple files at the same time, here are some of the key features that I have been looking forward to:
- The integrated activity stream that shows latest updates from people /events that I am following. It gives me a birds eye view of all the updates happening across the different areas that I am interested in. However I do worry that the information overload may be high especially when I follow quite a few people and communities.
- The ability to go to a profile and see all the latest updates from the profile owner across IBM Connections. This is quite interesting for me because there are people whom I do not follow on a regular basis but once in a while I would like to “catch up” with their updates. I believe this feature would help me do so.
- The whole Embedded Experiences concept – When seeing it on demonstrated in Lotusphere 2012, it did WOW me. I am really looking forward to playing with this.
Over the next few weeks I plan to immerse myself in the new Connections 4.0 version and am expecting a whole new experience.
Here are some of the links that are useful with respect to IBM Connections 4.0
How to download: https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24033179
Full Documentation: https://www-10.Lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/xpViewCategories.xsp?lookupName=IBM%20Connections%204.0%20documentation
What’s new in this release: https://www-10.Lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Whats_new_in_IBM_Connections_4_ic40
Fixes to be applied : https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21610344
Thanks for sharing.
Also worth noticing is the WAS fixpack level and the DB2 fixpack level. For those who upgrades from 3.0.1.1, the WAS and DB2 levels are usually lower than the ones required for IC4.0.
And as always, remember to apply fixpack for was, IHS, plugin and wassdk aswell, hehe.
True Robert …. Its not a one step process 🙁
I agree with the new features that enhances the experience – but how does it make “business sense” and make adoption easier? IMO Connections 4 is treading the Lotus Notes path, making it so heavy that will dread the end user.
Tim, I think there is a lot of value to be unlocked in open collaboration. For a business, if they can come up with a new R&D ahead of the curve OR solve a customer problem and share the solution, these can mean real $$. And Connections can unlock that especially with the integration abilities.
There is quite some work involved in setting up and rolling out Connections in an enterprise. However, the end user today is used to Facebook, LinkedIn and other tools. Connections brings the same concept inside – so I don’t see too many adoption issues (from a usability perspective). Most of the organizations do not yet have the open culture to share – bringing that change is more challenging.
The objectivity and Context of users in Social Media may not essentially help in case of Enterprises adopting social collab within the firewall. Like you said, there needs to be a cultural change and going by that i foresee Cloud Solutions (like IBM SmartCloud) doing better in the collaboration space than on-premise. I do not see customers being ready for heavy investments in on-premise deployments without testing the waters…and those who did, stayed with it (like yammer)