I’m getting old and my memory is failing – and ironically it was an e-mail containing a summary of our press coverage that reminded me that I’d commented on a YouGov survey (something I’d forgotten). The comments were distributed by our PR agency and ended up in a number of publications, such HR Review and Plugged In. Among my pearls of wisdom are:

Social collaboration offers great opportunities for business and allows users in disparate locations to easily collaborate and ensure they are reaching out to the right people with the required expertise and knowledge. While the business benefits are clear, we know that we need to raise the profile of social collaboration in the market place.

Not surprisingly, IBM Connections gets a mention.

Now here’s a funny thing, and kudos to our PR agency… look where else the story and some of my quotes end up.

Back in November 2010 I blogged about the release of IBM Lotus Connections 3. Hot on it’s heels (just four months later) comes version 3.0.1 – looking at the version number, you’d think that’s not much more than a fix pack for version 3.0, but you’d be wrong. One other thing of note is that Connections has lost its ‘Lotus’ brand… it’s now IBM Connections. I thought this would raise a few eyebrows and spark a few debates, but the reaction to that particular news item has been muted.

Anyway, let’s have a look at what’s new, and why this isn’t just a fix pack.

Ideation blog – what? What’s an ideation blog? Quite simply this gives members of a community the ability to post an idea, and comment and vote on ideas. Popular ideas can then be ‘graduated’ – this will create an activity to allow the community to take the idea forward. Behind the scenes the community manager has a lot of control over the ideation blogs – time limits on comments, moderation controls, setting a voting limit, author access rights and – most importantly – allowing the use of emoticons. Click on the image below to see an ideation blog in progress with voting and comments.

Community moderation – community owners can perform moderation on content and comments before or after it’s been posted. Perfect for community owners like me who don’t like their members posting off-topic content. And control freaks.

Media gallery – good news. I’ve seen a number of customer-requirement documents containing the words “YouTube-like media library”. And here we are. The media gallery allows you to upload movies and images, tag them, add a description and display them in a… what’s the word I’m looking for…? Ah yes… gallery. And then you can see the number of downloads and the comments. The perfect capability for adding some education media for a group of people. Click on the image for the gallery view.

Integration with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions – a capability added to Quickr a while ago now comes to Connections. A custom library can be created within a community and can surface content stored within a supported ECM solution. Any new or edited content will honour the ECM solution’s requirement for metadata, and you can do the usual document management stuff like check-in and check-out.

IBM Connections 3.0.1 is available now, and Lotus Greenhouse members can take it for a test-drive.

Here’s something that’s been in the works for a while internally and has now seen the light of day. I’m a big advocate of IBM Lotus Connections Files for sharing content. I like to see the look on peoples’ faces when I say “no, I won’t send that file to you… but I will share it with you”.

Using Connections Files I can control the sharing, I can see how many times the content has been downloaded (my most popular presentation has been downloaded 228 times, proving that I’m no Chris Crummey), who has downloaded it (very useful) and I can see comments and recommendations. The value-add for colleagues is that I’m not hitting their e-mail quotas with big file attachments.

Now some of that functionality has arrived in the Lotus Notes sidebar. Lotus Greenhouse members can download the plug-in which provides easy access to your Connections Files and drag-and-drop integration.

I can drag a file attachment from an e-mail (or Windows Explorer) and post it quickly to my Connections Files. If I want to share a file, there’s a couple of ways of doing that. I can drag it from the panel into a new e-mail… but rather than adding an attachment it adds a nicely-formatted link (see click-able image below). Alternatively I can share a file with people by right-clicking and selecting the ‘Share’ option, and then adding the names of colleagues. It even suggests people you’ve recently shared with.

I can see my own files, files that I’ve shared with other people, and files that have been shared with me. And probably the coolest feature (and very useful), for shared files I can actually see who has downloaded the file (and which version they downloaded).

Here in IBM-land we use Connections every day, often without thinking about it. I’ve got so used to it being there that it’s become second nature, but every now and again I stop to appreciate its value. And here’s a simple example.

About a week ago, I received an e-mail about the UK ODF Plugfest – I’ll let you visit the web site (if you’re interested) to find out what it’s all about. The question posed in the e-mail was “how are we [IBM] involved and are we getting any coverage from it?”. The assumption was that, because Symphony is part of my portfolio, I’d know all about the ODF Plugfest. The reality however was somewhat different – I’d never heard of it.

Not being the sort of person just to e-mail back with a “sorry, don’t know” I decided to dig a bit further. The web site itself really doesn’t describe what goes on, who attends, the remit of any attendees, the agenda… so wasn’t much use. But someone in IBM must know something about this… right?

Right indeed. I headed to the Communities in the IBM Connections deployment and searched for ‘ODF’ in the public communities. Milliseconds later the search results appeared, and top of the pile was a community named ‘Open Document Format Interest’. Sounds good. Inside the community were a number of bookmarks, documents, a wiki, an activity and – the key to the success in this example – twenty three members. I looked at the profiles of the owners – one was an ODF architect, the other an ODF program manager. And there was one other member I recognised, someone who in the past had answered a question relating to Public Sector in the UK. It looked like I was in the right place.

The first element of the community was a discussion forum, so I asked a question about ODF Plugfests and whether anyone had any knowledge or experience of what goes on at the event. Within a couple of days I’d received two responses giving me the answers I needed, and providing an interesting link about the push towards ODF in the UK Public Sector (which I bookmarked, of course).

And that’s it. I said it was a simple story, but Connections was key to finding the right people amongst the huge IBM population and collaborating with them.

I doubt it. But an interesting article from the London Evening Standard kicks off this idea.

Before we know it, email will seem as quaint as the fax machine and dial-up accounts.

The article starts with the thoughts of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. He rarely uses e-mail. And then Mark Zuckerberg (don’t know who he is, something to do with Facebook) who describes e-mail as ‘formal’.

Let me start by saying that I welcome the idea of receiving less e-mail. To me, there is nothing more frustrating than collaboratively sharing a piece of content, or setting up a collaborative activity, and then having someone e-mail their comments or revisions back to you. Actually, maybe trying to open a plastic carrier bag in a supermarket (you know, the ones where the inner surfaces cling to each other) is marginally more frustrating, but you get my point. Neither Mr Dorsey or Mr Zuckerberg work for large multi-national corporations with diverse business units, so their views won’t necessarily ring true with everyone.

Later in the article they discuss the power of social collaboration as a value-add for marketing – that’s something that McKinsey agree with, stating that “companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins”. Consider the old mailshot – that’s something likely to end up in my e-mail trash can. But information presented in the right manner on the web, and shared by trusted advisors in your network, is perhaps more likely to find the target.

Ignoring work, I rarely use e-mail. My personal e-mail account receives about ten e-mails a day – not spam, but mainly notifications. It’s rarely e-mail from real people. So here I’ll agree with Dorsey and Zuckerberg, most of my communications with real people outside of work (and some work-related) are via Facebook and Twitter. Now that Florida Steve has an iMac (smart fellow that he is) we use Skype with video to communicate.

My daughter Lolli has found her own way of communicating with her peers, having the luxury of never being put into an environment where e-mail is mandated. She has an e-mail account but rarely uses it – she’s part of the new generation. But will e-mail have disappeared from the workplace in time for her NOT to be given an e-mail client on her first day?

It’s an old habit that has to die hard, and such things don’t happen overnight. I’ve been a Lotus Notes e-mail user for over 19 years… even if that was only 5 years within an organisation that uses e-mail daily it’s a very embedded habit. You need something that replaces e-mail, and something that people will trust, understand and find easy to use. Replacing e-mail is not easy, because your e-mail is actually doing a number of jobs for you – it carries discussions, it delivers content, it notifies you, it draws you into business processes, and it allows you to collaborate with the outside world. However… look at those uses of e-mail… isn’t there a better way of doing all of those?

Of course, there are other ways of doing those things, but the problem is that you end up with something that’s fragmented. Discussions can take place in blogs, forums and activities. Content, I believe, shouldn’t be delivered – it should live in a shared place and you come to it. Notifications…? Let’s come back to that one. And collaborating with the outside world – the good thing about e-mail is that it’s a ubiquitous common denominator, but it’s also a break in the collaborative chain.

Oh, by the way, I should also mention that people receive e-mail on a variety of mobile devices, so you have to throw them into the equation.

Naturally, I’m going to bring this back round to the IBM collaborative portfolio. We’re going down the right path with Lotus Notes – it has the ability to bring most of these things together in the one client. Instant messaging, activities, content sharing, notifications (today in the form of RSS) and e-mail. But this is not the end-point. Look at Connections, in particular the stream of updates from the various facets of the platform. What you see there is starting to get towards the vision – the stream of updates shouldn’t just include stuff from the IBM / Lotus stable. Open standards are key to ensuring that the stream of information includes everything you need. And that is where Project Vulcan is heading. Expect to see much more at Lotusphere ’11 (if you’re going) or wait for the info to start arriving afterwards if you’re not going (like me).

In summary, I don’t believe that e-mail is going to die off this year, or even within the next 5 years. But I can see a time where it will get relegated to the side (the side bar, maybe) and a stream of open interactive notifications from various sources will take the centre-stage.

Something we’re often asked… when would you use [IBM Lotus] Quickr and when would you use Connections? My frolleague Louis Richardson, who just so happens to be our Worldwide Sales Executive for Social Software, has provided some thoughts on this question in the Collaboration Soapbox blog.

I’ve covered off this issue with customers in the past, and reading through Louis’ article I’m glad to say I wasn’t far off with my answer. Just as when people have asked questions like “does Domino integrate with XML?” it should be answered with another question – “what do you want to achieve?”. Sure, there is some overlap (the solutions have to stand on their own two feet) but the right solution can only be decided on by looking at the requirements. And isn’t that true of most things?

A couple of weeks ago we announced Lotus Connections 3, and today it became generally available. This is a substantial update with many improvements and some major new capabilities – so, it’s a good time to provide a quick overview of what’s new and improved.

Files – lots of new display options… you can now choose which pieces of information you see, and also choose whether to see full details or a ‘social view’. Collections have become folders – you can drag and drop files into them – and you can pin important files to give them extra visibility. Finally, you can take one of your files and copy it to a community.

Click on the image below for a larger view.

Communities – the two big improvements are the ability to create a friendly ‘handle’ URL for a community and the ability too create sub-communities within a community.

Bookmarks – some navigation and management improvements, and the ability to add an existing bookmark to an activity, community or blog.

Forums – previously forums only existed as an element within a community, but now they’re also a major Connections element in their own right.

The home page – improved layouts on the widgetised home page and the news feed, and recommendations… Connections will look at your tags and contacts, and then suggest other content you might be interested in (what we describe as social analytics).

Following – you can follow certain Connections elements and be notified when they are updated. Follow-able elements include wikis (entire wikis or specific pages), files and folders, forums, blogs, activities, communities and profiles. So just about everything.

Improved navigation – the top level navigation is now simplified but at the same time offers more. The home page, profiles and communities sit on the top level, and everything else sits under ‘Apps’. That drop-down menu allows you to jump to certain places in one click (e.g. files shared with you).

New APIs – probably the most important of these APIs is that which allows compliance and auditability solutions to integrate with Connections.

That’s a small selection of all that’s new and improved – for the full list see here.

If you haven’t discovered the This Week in Lotus podcast series yet I suggest that you check it out. This week would be a good time to start – joining regular hosts Stuart McIntyre and Darren Duke are Suzanne Livingstone and Mac Guidera from the Lotus Connections product management team (discussing Connections 3, which will feature here on dadams.co.uk very soon).

Also featured in episode 26 – and I apologise for this appalling act of self-promotion – is one Mr Darren Adams, talking about notesiscool.com. Like so many other people I hate listening to my own voice, I think I sound like Jools Holland and say “errrrm” and “you know” too much.

Regardless of my own shortcomings as a broadcaster the podcast was great fun to record, and thanks to Stuart and Darren (Duke)’s enthusiasm and informal style it’s always a great listen.

Episode 26 is available to listen to on-line and is also available on iTunes.

Here’s a chance to register for some Lotus  webcasts during June…

• A deep-dive on building Lotus Domino applications with XPages (17th)
• Drive growth and deliver outstanding business results through exceptional web experiences (22nd)
• Harness a changing workforce and drive growth with social software (23rd)
• Collaboration in the cloud: grow your business and reduce costs (24th)

To register go to this page and then follow the links to the individual webcasts.

I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, because like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop working, and the functionality isn’t given back to you until you’ve fixed the problem. But is that fair? After all, was it the mail box owner at fault?

I’m speaking as someone who recently had to concede that, after more than 10 years with a 150 mb mail box quota, I could no longer keep it within the limit every day – I was spending too much time managing the volume, so I had to apply to go up to the next level, 250 mb. Why, in an organisation with a rich collaborative infrastructure, was this necessary? I put it down purely to my change in role – suddenly I was communicating with many more people and there was an increase in data flying around. It reminded me of a slide I sometimes use on less serious occasions, such as the recent keynote at Collaboration University. Entitled ‘about me as an e-mail user’ it explains that I don’t like having a scroll bar in my inbox and I resent anyone who…

• Forces me over my mail quota
• Sends me two e-mails when only one was required
• Marks everything they send as high priority (yes, I know who you are)
• Starts an e-mail with “I know you’re busy but…” – but what?
• Sends me an e-mail and then immediately Sametimes me or phones me to ask if I’ve read the e-mail
• Continues to reply-to-all way past the point where I’ve ceased to be involved or interested
• Only knows how to use PrtSc rather than Alt-PrtSc

So in summary, just about anyone who sends me an e-mail.

A couple of years ago I did a small survey of some of our customers, not big enough or detailed enough to draw any great conclusions from, and asked the question…

In terms of e-mail efficiency what would benefit your organisation the most – improvement in user practises around e-mail, or operational improvements?

71% said user practises, 29% said both, but no-one (0%) said operational improvements alone. So the conclusion is that end users need to be given the tools in order to become more efficient with how they disseminate information, but they also need some clarity about the right tools to use and when.

I believe that we’ve added the right things to the Lotus portfolio to help end users to realise better collaboration and knowledge management – simple things that make a difference. Firstly, think how your typical e-mail user would share a spreadsheet, document or presentation with a colleague (or group)… we all know the right thing to do is to post it to a collaborative space (which hopefully supports the business activity associated with the content) and then notify people of the content via e-mail. However, most e-mail users have escaped from Utopia via a small hole in the fence, so they’re just going to shove that file attachment in the e-mail regardless of the storage or content revision issues.

That’s why I love the Quickr approach – because it supports the users’ long-ingrained behaviour (shove in the attachment) but at the point of sending it offers to place the file in a document repository. The recipient sees a set of links, and they click to navigate to the content. Simple. So collaboratively we’re doing the right thing, but we haven’t interrupted the user’s normal pattern of work (in my head I’m picturing people grunting like Cro Magnon man did when he spotted a bison wandering across the Paleolithic plains, but instead they’re saying “ugg, file attachment”). The added bonus with Quickr is that you can also take existing file attachments that Cro Magnon man sent to you in the past and offload them to a Quickr place – you can retain the e-mail with the link replacing the attachment.

The other thing I love telling people about is Connections Files. To fully embrace the idea of Connections Files you do have to discard the caveman instincts and post that file… no, not in an e-mail, in your Connections file-space. Yes, I know this goes against years of bad habits, so the important thing is for users to realise the benefits. The first benefit is to other people – you are not contributing to ruining their day by sending that quota-busting spreadsheet. Okay, so you don’t care about their quota, how about a benefit for yourself? Have you ever sent an e-mail with a file attachment and then later someone else wants the file? And then someone else a bit later? This used to happen to me all of the time, but not any more. Rather than having to repeat the process of create another e-mail, type in the subject, find the file attachment in a folder (hmmm, which folder), add an explanation – I just share the file. The file in question is posted in Connections Files and I add another name to the share list. An e-mail is automatically sent, and the recipient grabs the content but doesn’t have to worry about the volume of data. If the file is updated, I simply add the update as a new version and note the changes.

Another great way to share content, in the context of a business activity, is Lotus Connections Activities, but I’ve already covered that in an earlier post.