Lotus Connections 2.5 has finally been released, and with a whole host of features. We’ve been using Connections 2.5 beta for a while at Headshift, quite often to build stories and user journeys showing the art of the possible with social software. We talked as much as we could about it but now the final code has been released we’ve been taking an in-depth look and here’s what we’ve found. We focus mainly on updates from 2.0, if you want a run-down of all features from the ground up (albeit written by IBM) I suggest you look at the reviewers’ guide.
Connections has always been built around components, traditionally Profiles, Blogs, Communities, Dogear and Activities, as well as the homepage. Connections 2.5 significantly updates Profiles, Communities and the Homepage, as well as adding two new features, Files and Wikis. Bookmarks, Blogs and Activities remain pretty much unchanged, with the exception that you can embed them within Communities. Activities remains a lightweight task management tool, which really shines when used with Notes 8, but isn’t necessarily a Social business tool, especially if you are not a Notes shop.
In addition, the overall look and feel has been improved, and social meta-data, allowing you to quickly see number of views or replies to a topic, has been enhanced. Dogear has also been renamed to the more appropriate “Bookmarks”.
In terms of Mobile access this has been improved, with native support for iPhone and Nokia S60 platform for Activities, Blogs and Profiles. A Connections application for Blackberry is available from RIM.
Homepage
The homepage as been completely revamped, providing a “river of news”, essentially a stream of activity from within your network. This is available as an RSS feed so that notifications can come into email clients or feedreaders where people live on a day to day basis, pulling them into Connections rather than relying on people taking time in their day to log into the site.
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Here you can see updates coming from replies in forums, and notification of colleague invites, but any updates from any of the other features would also appear here. Top Updates shows activity in my network and my contributions, Discover shows me updates across the entire site, my watchlist allows me to create my own filters based on people and tags and notifications includes messages , whether people have requested to add me as a colleague or whether I have been accepted into a community.
I can mark any notification as a story if I want to review it later, and this appears under the saved stories tab.
I would imagine that the basic Top Updates would be enough for most people – if this was delivered as a feed into an email client such as Notes or Outlook it would encourage participation by notifying me when activity was happening. “My network and my contributions” is a good filter – it stops me from being overwhelmed, whilst at the same time not requiring me to explicitly mark Communities or Blog posts as things I want to watch. My network tacitly filters content for me, yet still introduces me to people outside of my network by pushing all responses to my content within this feed.
The old widget-based homepage remains, with an improved range of widgets (and you can always write new widgets yourself), but in all our time using Connections 2.5 and the beta, we hardly used it with our clients. The river of news was far more useful and intuitive, and more often than not our stories started with feeds into an email client, rather than people looking at the river of news on a web page.
Profiles
Profiles have received a welcome update, with an improved layout and the addition of status updates. Connections provides no official Adobe Air client as Socialtext does to turn status updates into true signals across your organisation, but Luis Benitez has released Bluto which uses the open API to do so, which is not only a useful application but a great example of what can be done with the Connections API. Bluto also allows you to cross-post to Twitter – just be sure you know which network you are posting to!
Status updates are posted on your board (a Facebook wall in all but name), and people can post their own comments on your wall, as shown here where a status update alerts a colleague that he needs to get in touch with Jon ASAP if he is to catch him before he goes on holiday! You can still tag other people’s profiles, which is a good way to crowdsource expertise if finding a subject matter expert is a core use case for your organisation.
 
There a a few things that could have been done better – including your network’s status updates under their photos for one, as well as seeing their recent posts when you view your network. There is also no “similar people” functionality to help find likeminded people, that would have to be done by browsing tags – but these are minor points, the Profiles feature is a strong update.
Communities
Communities have finally become useful in Connections 2.5. They have effectively become what would be called “Spaces” in other platforms, and can be the basic building block of your information architecture. They can be public, closed or secret, and can contain discussions, blogs, wikis, files, feeds, bookmarks and activities. They can be customised in terms of content and theme (not all Communities need have all the components) and security is inherited, so if my Community blog is secret then the blog will not be findable within the Blogs feature. If it is a public Community, the blog will appear, and will be marked as a “Community blog“. The same happens for wikis. Somewhat confusingly, the same is not true of Files of Bookmarks – they always remain part of the Community, and cannot be found in the Files feature (see Files below
for more on this).
for more on this).
 
Despite these drawbacks, Communities are still very good ways of bringing together a group of resources for a specific group or community of interest.
Wikis
I was really worried about how wikis would be implemented in Connections 2.5. The wiki functionality in Quickr is dire, but I was pleasantly surprised. The Rich Text editor is easy to use, and supports images, Flash, tables, paste from Word, paste as plain text to remove formatting, and find and replace within the editor (which is a feature I’ve not seen before, and highly useful given that browsers generally won’t find and replace within an edit box).
 
Additionally, you can link to other wiki pages very easily with a pop-up box, but not other Connections pages (eg a Blog, Profile or Forum).
You canedit in WYSIWYG, HTML or wiki text. The wiki also supports the child/parent concept, and it is very easy to move pages around within the hierarchy. You can be notified by email of changes or comments, or subscribe to the page via RSS.
Wiki changes are recorded and you can restore previous versions. The wiki comparison feature is up there with any other wiki platform
 
You cannot import or export from Word (aside from Copy/Pate) – in fact you cannot export in any format, which is a big issue if you were compiling a significant amount of content and taking advantage of child/parent pages. In wikis such as Confluence you can export entire spaces, including all parent/children as one PDF or Word document, something we have implemented on many occasions for clients who find it highly useful. This would be a very onerous task in Connections.
Additionally, you can attach files to wiki pages, which is a common feature with most wikis, but is confusing within Connections as you have the Files feature as well, not to mention IBM’s other file sharing products such as Quickr. If I attach a file to a page it does not show up in my Files, also, I cannot link to a File from a wiki page, I have to re-upload it to my page.
FilesWhich leads us nicely onto Files, which offers a great deal of functionality but also confusion. The Files feature allows me to upload a file, and make it private, available to everyone, or available to only certain people (with either editor or reader privileges). In addition I can add a message (ie “please review this proposal”). A nice UX touch is that people I have recently shared files with are shown to me, making it easy for me to quickly share files with my team for example. However, groups are not supported, but a Files component can be embedded within a Community, allowing a group to share files in that way.
 
Files can be tagged, downloaded, commented on or recommended, and these are shown so you can see how useful files are from the social meta-data. The comment feature is also highly useful in terms of recording the conversation as to how the file ended up the way it did during the review process. Making this conversation public rather than locked in email folders increases the context in which the file can be (re)used. Versions are also stored so can revert to previous versions. If someone has shared a file with me I can also share that file with someone else (only as reader). This can be highly useful, for example if someone has asked me to review a proposal, but I think that someone else might also have useful input. Bear in mind that the original author may not even be aware of the existence of the second reviewer, so it expands the author’s collaboration network across your organisation.
 
Folders are not supported, but you can group files as a “Collection” – essentially a single-level folder, but you cannot have Collections of Collections.
This is highly useful in terms of being able to review proposals amongst team members, so why the confusion? Files behave differently in the standalone feature and when embedded within a Community. At a basic level, a if I upload a file into a Community, even if it is public, it is not placed within the Files feature, it is locked within that Community. I cannot comment on a file in a Community making it difficult to have a conversation around a file. I cannot attach a file to a forum, or easily link to a file. Files attached to wiki pages are separate, and do not feature in the Files feature. In addition, IBM offers Quickr as a document management tool, which can be embedded within a Community. IBM customers are rightly confused as to whether they should be using Files or integrating with Quickr.
It would be much easier if any upload placed the document within your Files, and you could then link to them from blog posts, discussion forums, wiki pages or Communities. As it stands, whilst this feature is innovative and useful, we recommend clients think very carefully about how they will lead their users to understand the best way to make use of the feature, especially if they plan to take advantage of Communities and/or Quickr.
ConclusionLotus Connections is a huge step forward from 2.0. As we posted previously, IBM
does not produce updates as often as its rivals such as Jive and Socialtext, but has a history of catching up fast after a slow start. I would recommend that any Connections 2.0 customers or pilots upgrade to 2.5 as soon as is practical, many of the problems we see in adoption of Connections 2.0 are solved by functionality only available in 2.5 – there is little sense in rolling out or persisting with 2.0 today.
does not produce updates as often as its rivals such as Jive and Socialtext, but has a history of catching up fast after a slow start. I would recommend that any Connections 2.0 customers or pilots upgrade to 2.5 as soon as is practical, many of the problems we see in adoption of Connections 2.0 are solved by functionality only available in 2.5 – there is little sense in rolling out or persisting with 2.0 today.
Profiles, Communities and the Homepage have received welcome updates that puts Connections on a par with its rivals in terms of functionality, and Wikis and Files are welcome additions and in the main well thought through.
The areas that IBM still needs to pay attention to are consistency across Community bookmarks and files and their standalone components. IBM’s strategy around Files needs clarifying in terms of its positioning against Quickr.
That being said, the barriers to any Connections platform will not be in the technology, the platform is maturing fast and pound for pound it matches up against any enterprise Social Business platform out there today. The key to success is a detailed understanding of use cases and the specific benefits it will bring to end users. Headshift works with clients to help them uncover these, and deploy Connections in the context of business needs, rather than pilots for people to ‘play’ with.
Anyone interested in looking further at Connections as part of their Social Business Design strategy should get in touch to talk to us in more detail!
It’s interesting you mention …”there is also no ‘similar people’ functionality to help find like-minded people”… as we certainly have had this internally in IBM for a long time (before Connections 2.5 even). It’s a pity its not part of the Connections 2.5 release – but certainly the technology for it is already developed.
I have two widgets on my homepage to do just this in fact – a “Do You Know?” widget which shows me people who might be of interest (based of my and their tags, communities, bookmarks, etc.) and the “Interesting People” widget which is similar to the above but tells me the “strength” of my connection to this person currently, based on analysis of connections made in the social network graph.
You might want to ask your contacts at IBM about the “Social Networks & Discovery (SaND)” team – which does a lot of work in this field.
If memory serves me properly, they did a pitch at Lotusphere 2009 about this tech, and that they can be engaged by clients / BPs via ISSL.