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Stuart McIntyre is one of the very few people who could get his hands on version 3.0 of IBM Lotus Connections. While the product is still in beta, Stuart is allowed to give you a sneak preview and tell you a couple of things that otherwise cannot yet be revealed.  

He will do his presentation from a more technical view: what has changed since 2.5, what difference to scaling, how will organisations upgrade, what customisation is available and more. This session is quite technical and interesting only for those who have actually seen and 'touched' Lotus Connections before.

Dan Woods: Why is it important to look beyond the collaborative dial tone and explore the opportunity for knowledge capture and process discovery?

Jeff Schick: There are people who know how to do things and people who need to know how to do things. Whether the activity is on-boarding an employee, submitting a patent, or creating a proposal to win business, we all benefit when we capture what we learned and expose as much as possible in repeatable patterns. Both the creators and users of knowledge are interested in such a process if it is easy enough to accomplish.The opportunities for efficiency and productivity are tremendous.

What are the preconditions for knowledge capture and process discovery in activity templates?

The starting point for most work is a search for people, IP, or some sort of knowledge. You don't have to start right away with the idea of creating repeatable business processes. The first goal is to use the collaborative dial tone to create a body of work. This means having a repository so staff can find people that may help them, identify intellectual property that may be applied to a problem, and search other bodies of knowledge collected in all sorts of ways.

The next step is prescribing work to others with knowledge attached. To do a certain task you may need to refer to a certain set of people, IP, and other knowledge. This is where the idea of the activity template is crucial. The template collects not only information but the steps involved in getting the work done and a description of what happens in those steps. If it is easy to capture information about the task and the steps, certain activity templates will grow into fully formed descriptions of processes, so staff do not have to re-invent the wheel and can do work more efficiently with higher quality.

You are invited to an IBM Technical Exchange Webcast call about Lotus Connections deployment best practices. There is no charge for participating. The topic and dial information for this call is:

Title: Lotus Connections V2.5 Deployment Best Practices

Date: June 23rd, 2010
Time: 10 am - 11 am eastern US time (2:00 pm GMT)
Webcast access: https://www.lotuslive.com/en/join?schedid=4419191
Audio by phone:
Toll free US: 866-803-2143
Toll call US: 210-795-1098
International Numbers: Click here: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21433894
Confirmation Code: CONNECTIONS
Please dial in 5-10 minutes early to allow time for registration of all participants before the presentation starts.

Open Mic calls are Question & Answer sessions with a panel of subject matter experts covering your questions without going thru a slide presentation.
Webcasts are slide presentations by a single presenter followed by Questions & Answers related to the material covered, as time permits.

You can submit your question in advance via our forum, "developerWorks Lotus Connections forum". Questions should be of general interest. Troubleshooting of specific problems should still be handled by Technical Support, not by Webcast calls. We will collect questions, which have been posted to the forum topic announcing the call, and address as many of them as possible on the call. We will also take questions not submitted in advance.

You will need to provide your name and company affiliation when dialing in. You will need a touch tone phone to be able to ask questions. The presentation will be recorded and (in potentially edited form) made available via the web page containing dial-in numbers above.

• Stop the application
• Backup the DB
• Run through the code to remove the Trigger
• Recreate the Trigger
• Start the primary server and test
• Assuming all is well start the other App Servers in the clusters

The "Measuring the Value of Social Software" white paper focuses on helping organizations answer the question:

How can we determine if our social software initiatives are successful and are providing the anticipated return on technology investment?

This white paper looks at how to measure the effectiveness and value of a social software initiative, what tools are available to capture key metrics, and what to take into consideration when establishing a measurement approach.

Contents

• Why measure?
• Defining objectives
• Types of measurement
• Measurement levels
• Measurement tools
• Sample reports
• Creating a measurement approach

Technical Description                          
Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in IBM Lotus Connections, which could be exploited by attackers to bypass security restrictions or gain knowledge of sensitive information. These issues are caused by input validation and design errors in the Dojo, Community, Homepage, Bookmarks and Blogs components, and other unspecified modules when processing user-supplied data or when connecting to certain web sites, which could allow information disclosure, or cross site scripting and phishing attacks.

Affected Products
IBM Lotus Connections versions prior to 2.5.0 Fix Pack 2 (2.5.0.2)

Solution
Upgrade to IBM Lotus Connections version 2.5.0 Fix Pack 2 (2.5.0.2)

• there is a new Lotus Connections Update Installer WebSphere Update Installer for Lotus Connections Version 2.5.0.2  
• there is fix to TDI that must be applied manually
• all customisations must be backed up and then reapplied.

Are you getting the highest ROI from your Lotus Connections investment? Are you reducing costs, improving service, communicating better or collaborating more efficiently?

With this solution you will be able to measure the value of your investment. You will receive the IBM Software Services (ISSL) Reporting Tool for Lotus Connection and Measurement Consulting Services to help you develop a framework to measure the value of your Lotus Connections investment.

Reporting Tool for Lotus Connections
The Reporting Tool for Lotus Connections enhances and extends Lotus Connection's built-in reporting tools:
Snapshot and trend reports showing adoption, usage and system metrics across all the Lotus Connection features.
Simple web-based visualization with bar charts, line charts and tables. Easily view adoption rates for key Lotus Connections features based on days, months and years.
Export metrics to Brio, Excel, Crystal Reports and others.

The Measurement Framework for Social Software
In addition to Reporting Tool, we provide consulting services to help you define your measurement approach.
The measurement approach includes multiple categories of measurements including vitality, capability and business value.
We provide you with multiple techniques for uncovering the links between metrics and your business drivers.
You will be able to quantify the adoption rate of Lotus Connections, analyze and remediate adoption gaps and understand the contribution of social networking content.

Highlights
Trend & Snapshot Reporting: 30+ Bar, Line, Tabular reports across all Connections features.
Easy Export: Export data to 3rd party reporting solutions.
Installation Services: We install the Reporting Tool.
Measurement Consulting: We assist you in developing your overall measurement framework using Reporting Tool metrics and other measurement sources.

Take the Lotus Connections Installation Documentation survey from now until May 12, 2010. It should take only about 20 minutes to complete, and you have the option of taking the survey anonymously.

Take the survey yourself and forward the link to others you know who have performed a Lotus Connections installation. This is a great opportunity to get your thoughts and opinions heard. Your feedback and suggestions will help drive changes to our Lotus Connections technical content. Also, continue to stay tuned for future usability evaluations on some of our other products that we will be conducting throughout the year. We look forward to hearing from you!

It would be nice to simplify this process and automatically notify people, as is done from the Connections Web UI. In fact, there is a hidden feature in the Notes 8.5.1 client that takes care of this. The new mechanism allows you to specify the people who should be notified when creating the bookmark.
Enabling the new mechanism for your Notes client

Follow the steps below to enable this feature:
1.        Browse to your Notes installation and then navigate to the 
frameworksharedeclipseplugins location. For example, on Microsoft Windows this location could be:
C:Program FilesIBMLotusNotesframeworksharedeclipseplugins
2.        Search for a plug-in named com.ibm.openactivities.client.common.service
3.        Edit plugin.properties under of this plugin, changing the property “dogear.disable.notification:” to dogear.disable.notification=false
(NOTE: ‘dogear’ is the former name of the Connections Bookmark service)
4.        Restart the Notes client.

A new field titled "Notify Users" displays below the Description field. The new field supports type-ahead and uses the LDAP information from the Connections Activities service. You can also manually add any email address, separating multiple email addresses with a comma.

IBM and LinkedIn just boosted social networking in the enterprise with a new widget which offers Lotus Connections users instant access to LinkedIn profiles. 

Big Blue's latest addition to its widget catalog is a plug-in that integrates LinkedIn's professional graph, information used to define people's connections and relationships, with IBM Lotus Connections social software for business. The new widget allows users to enhance their Lotus Connections Profile with information from their LinkedIn profile. 



LinkedIn is an online network of more than 60 million business professionals in more than 200 countries. With the new LinkedIn widget, users can access the world's most popular professional network directly from Lotus Connections. With this widget, IBM is combining the best of business and professional social networking sites, making it easier for users to access and view LinkedIn professional profiles with just one click from within Lotus Connections.



“IBM's integration with LinkedIn demonstrates our commitment to providing social software solutions based on open standards that instantly connect people with information,” said Jeff Schick, VP of Social Software, IBM. “Through these integrations, we are making it easier for enterprises to maximize the use of and derive value from social software.”

The Lotus Connections Profiles service permits a user to share their contact information, report to chain, and details they provide in their About Me section on the Profiles page.  This new widget permits a Lotus Connections user to include information from their LinkedIn profile in their Lotus Connections profile. Some examples of LinkedIn information that can be included on a Lotus Connections Profile include: job experience, education, honors and awards, personal interests, Web sites, number of recommendations and specialties. 

The plug-in can be easily added to a user's Lotus Connections Profile and gives each user control about how much they would like to share from their LinkedIn profile.
The LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Connections is available to customers for download from https://greenhouse.lotus.com