Another weekend another set of updates to IBM Connections Cloud, one of which is a new look and feel to IBM Connections Cloud Meetings. Â The Meeting UI has been updated to the Verse theme, and gone is the blank gray box which used to be prominent and it is replaced with quick actions to share your screen or files.
Coming next is Audio/Video integration in Meetings, I have been beta testing it for a while now and happy to see it coming to release shortly.
Check out Luis Benitez’s blog for more of the new capabilities releases this weekend
We heard last January at IBM Connect that the IBM Collaboration Solutions would all be rebranded under the IBM Connections name. Â IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is no exception and will be changing later in September.
Current Name
New Name
IBM SmartCloud Engage Advanced
IBM Connections Cloud S1
IBM SmartCloud Engage Standard
IBM Connections Cloud S2
IBM SmartCloud iNotes
IBM Connections Web Mail Cloud
IBM SmartCloud Archive Essentials
IBM Connections Archive Essentials Cloud
IBM SmartCloud Connections
IBM Connections Social Cloud
IBM SmartCloud Docs
IBM Connections Docs Cloud
IBM SmartCloud Meetings
IBM Connections Meetings Cloud
(New Offering)
IBM Connections Chat Cloud
Looks like they are holding off on changing the Notes Mail product names until Mail Next launches.
The URLs will not be changing, just the product names.
IBM Connections Next is coming, with the details being announced on May 21st. Â I love this trailer that Luis Benitez put together ahead of the announcement.
Chris Whisonant and I had fun preparing and presenting this one together at IBM Connect 2014. Â If you are using IBM Connections this should help you get even more out of Profiles
For those attending IBM Connect 2014 you should have already received your credentials to the Connect 2014 online site, which in large part is powered by IBM Connections. If you want to use the IBM Connections Mobile App (Android, iOS) it can be easily configured as follows.
Add a new account and select
“My company’s server’
Next use the this URL “https://connections.connect2014.com/mobile” along with the credentials you should have received from IBM.
Simple as that you now have access to the Connect 2014 Connections environment on the go.
If you use IBM Connections you should be running the mobile app on your phone or tablet. Â Today an update shipped adding lots of new features including support for multiple accounts, useful if you have a need to connect to more than one instance of IBM Connections. Â I received the update on my Android tablet, and am guessing that it is working it’s way through the Apple approval process and will be in the App Store soon
One of IBM Connections features is Bookmarks, where you can save and share bookmarks, in addition to simply sharing a bookmark you can share it with a Community, add it to an Activity, or create a blog post out of it, all from the same bookmarklet.
Nice functionality, but I find a lot of content to share while in Google Reader, so I thought it would be nice to be able to share directly from Google Reader in to IBM Connections. Google Reader allows you to create your own Send To Actions so you can share beyond the services they already set up for you. You can find and customize the Send To actions in Google Reader Preferences
at the bottom of the page you will find instructions for creating your own Send To actions
I added a Sent To action for IBM Connections in the Lotus Greenhouse, to configure for your own site just replace ‘greenhouse.lotus.com’ with the URL of your own Connections installation. There are three fields required to create a Send To action
Name: This is how it will appear in your menu (IBM Connections in my example)
URL: this is the URL to the bookmarklet along with the keywords for URL, Title, etc. Mine looks like this
Icon URL: if you want an image to appear next to the Name you can point to an image here, I pointed to the Bookmark Image from greenhouse.
Save your Sent To action and you can now share directly from Google Reader in to IBM Connections
If you use Google Reader on multiple machines the Send To action will appear on any machine you log in to with the same Google ID you created it under. If you IBM Connections environment is behind a firewall, the Send To action will only work when you have access to Connections.
A while ago I asked the question “What is in your plugin_customization.ini†where I talked about all the features that can be set via the plugin_customization.ini file, but a severe lack of documentation for them.
