This post was propmpted by a thread in Ben Langhinrichs blog. http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/archive/20070124-0702
In my response to the post, I promised Ben that I would try to give a brief explanation of what Connections is. The announcement was well received by the Lotusphere attendees and by the analysts, but I have the feeling that it has not been fully understood by everyone. This is normal, since is a new product quite different from the rest of our offerings, so I am trying here to shed some lights upon it.

Let me start saying that the concept is not new at all. Connections is all about collaboration and we've been doing this since ever; also someone can remember a product we had a few years ago, Discovery Server. The idea behind it was to create a tool that would let you capture and organize the "collective knowledge" in your organization. These ideas are at the basis of Connections, though the product now is quite different from Discovery Server. Another concept we talked about in the last years is the one of Activity Centric computing, and I am sure that many of you have heard about Activity Explorer (actually this is exactly what Ben wes referring to in his post); also Activities are a part of Connections.

Having set a bit of background, let's now see with more details what Connections is.
Connections is composed of 5 parts : Profiles, Communities, Dogear, Blogs and Activities.



Let's see them one by one
Profiles


As you can see from the image above, Profiles is the place where you add informations about people in your organization. Informations can be of various kind, the above example is taken by the Lotusphere-on-line website but you can have different kind of informations displayed. Notice that we use also tags, this let every person declare areas of expertise or interest they have and use this tags for searching. To quote from the Lotusphere presentation on Social Netowrks " Profiles is a hub for contact info, organizational structure and user-provided information".

Communities



I guess everyone is familiar with the concept of comunity. A group of people with same interests or expertise (the Lotus bloggers, the Lotus Geeks,...)
Connections lets you create communities, where people have available various tools that help them stay in touch and collaborate (mail, announcements, discussion areas, ...). An example is : I have a question on a specific topic and I broadcast the question to the community; every member of the community will receive an alert ( in form of a small popup ) and can start a n-way chat with me and the other people who are willing to help.

Dogear


If you are familiar with del.icio.us. then you can skip this part, you already have the idea. If you are not, Dogear is a bookmark sharing application. What does this mean ? You can share the bookmarks you think are interesting with other people in order to create a "meta" bookmark list accessible by many people. An excellent explanation of Dogear can be found here : http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/20060627_dogear.html

Activities



This needs a bit of explanation since I guess is the part most new to everyone.
The idea behind Activities is to let people work focused on the task rather than on the tools they use to accomplish it. When creating a sales proposal to a customer I use different tools : word processor to create docs, presentations for team meetings, I chat with several people involved in the selling process, I use links to pages on my intranet, and so on.... All of this "objects" are residing in different places on my workstation (file system, mailfile, bookmarks, text files of chat transcript....) so is not easy for me to have an immediate picture of everything and of where I am in the process. Activities allow me to create an Activity which is a single place where I can store all the above mentioned objects, rather than having them spread in different places. I can easily get hold of everything has been used and since I can see the activity in a timeline, I can easily get the evolution of the process and know the status, who did what and when. To use the words of my colleagues from IBM Research "An activity can be defined as a logical unit of work that incorporates all the tools, people, and resources needed to get a job done". You can read an excellent article about activities here http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/454/geyer.pdf

Blogs

Well, if you are reading this, then there is nothing I have to explain about this part


As I said in the beginning this is just an attempt on my side to give you a brief explanation of what Connections is. This post is definitely not the ultimate resource you need, and I invite you to go to the Social Networking page of Lotus website http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/connections . There are many useful resources there if you want to know more on this subject.

RoB

1. Ben Langhinrichs01/30/2007 03:45:39 PM
Homepage: http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog

Thanks, RoB. That was a very useful overview, and I think I get it a bit more clearly now.

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2. Chris Miller01/30/2007 04:24:29 PM
Homepage: http://www.IdoNotes.com

Another good overview. What people do not understand at this time is that IBM has been using this in some form for a while, thereby giving good content that has grown. However, tossing this into any environment is going to take time to build the Dogears, profiles and just about anything else you can imagine. Having the buy in and participation from everyoine is the main struggle up front. Making use of the technology is hard enough when people do not like to share their personal knowledge in most companies

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3. Roberto Boccadoro01/30/2007 05:15:16 PM
Homepage: http://www.yellowisthenewblack.com

Chris
You are right, we've been using this internally for a while. Profiles are used in our corporate directory, Bluepages, for example.
I agree with you , this is not a technological issue, as you said building Dogear, profiles etc ...takes some time but is not a big problem; the problem is convincing people that sharing the knowledge is the right thing to do. In many companies this is not yet the case.
I'd like to quote my colleague Luis Suarez "when competing hoard your knowledge, when collaborating share it"

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4. Stefano Pogliani01/30/2007 06:22:44 PM
Homepage: http://tech.poglianis.net

Very nice summary,RoB !
I would add that Connections, as many of the Web2.0 technologies, put the user at the centre of the universe and exploits the power of information.
Any information in Connections is never static; it is the continuous result of how a community evolves and understands itself.
Bookmarks are important in the context of the tags they receive.
A Profile itself is a representation of how anybody is seen by his/her colleagues in the context of what he/she does; it is the result of how I show myself and how I am seen by the others.
A Community is a living entity that aggregates around a specific topic, probably aggregating people sharing same interests and performing similar Activities.

In addition to these wonderful things, Connections is aalso packaged, integrated solution which benefits from an intese and wide usage inside IBM.

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5. Stuart Bogom01/31/2007 08:41:48 AM

Thanks, this is very helpful. Do you know of any explanation of Quickr that has this level of detail?

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6. Roberto Boccadoro01/31/2007 12:51:02 PM
Homepage: http://www.yellowisthenewblack.com

@5 - No, but I can always try to write something about Quickr as well.
You will need to wait a few days though, I am busy with customer meetings for the rest of the week.

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7. Gauzo03/22/2007 01:01:56 AM
Homepage: http://www.a-w.it

Thank you Rob for the clear explaination....
anyway it's still not clear to me the reason why the Activities are beeing part of this software package, that's a little bit "social" oriented, while they have a relevant role in the new Notes 8 interface....

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