Suzanne Livingston and Michael Wanderski are presenting on communities in Connections. My notes from the session:
– Will be talking about a variety of use cases for communities (note that these are similar to what I talk about in the collaboration scenarios in Collaboration Roadmap. It’s also an approach I initially wrote about in Seamless Teamwork).
– IBM Connections offers a plethora of tools – profiles, communities, files, wikis, activities, forums, home page, social analytics, micro-blogging, bookmarks, and blogs. Within a community, there are a further set of capabiliies just for the specific community. Eg., the ideation blog.
– When setting up a community, ask this question: What’s the goal? Which capabilities do I need to help the community members to reach this goal?
– Scenarios:
– … (1) Evaluating Product Ideas – Mike showed the use of an ideation blog for capturing, ranking, and promoting ideas. For the manager, they can stop the creation of new ideas, as well as freezing the whole blog. Ideas can be graduated, and you have the option of spawning an activity for ongoing management.
– … (2) Strengthening Customer Relationships with New Products – using activities for planning future action, and forums with moderated content.
– … (3) Improving Social Media Presence – the ability to reach into social media services on the Internet, and get a reading on the current sentiment. Or seeing what’s being said, and responding to particular issues (whether positive or negative). There are some new things coming, and the Feeds area has been available for a long time. With c.Next, there may be the capability to “Discuss This” for a web page or blog post.
– … (4) Creating Effective Teams … using Quickr Document Library integration, place catalog, and calendar. With document integration, you can bring existing content across more easily. It shows the Quickr document library within the Connectinos page. Results are security trimmed – the user gains access to the documents in Quickr that they are permmitted to see. There’s also a team calendar coming in c.Next. c.Next calendars can be added to a personal calendar – but it’s an overlay to the calendar, but it doesn’t block it off for free-busy.
– … (5) Socializing Enterprise Content – the ability to link to Quickr and SharePoint documents.

It was a good session. Good to see the scenarios approach being used as a way of describing capabilities.