In one of the first sessions on the morning of day 3 at IBM Connect, Sean Brown, John Medicke, and Zi Ying Li, is talking about what’s new in IBM Docs. Some notes:

1. IBM Docs is available today via SmartCloud, and also for on-premises deployment with IBM Connections.

2. What’s a social business? A social business embraces networks of people to create business value and transform how they interact. However, the status quo document model falls short. Eg., people lose time searching through email for documents, and time collecting/consolidating everyone’s feedback. Added up it’s about 20% productivity loss per year.
– … this causes a bottleneck for the information worker.

3. A “social document” in a social business:
– … teams work in one primary document.
– … supports different work models – real time or asychronous.
– … no desktop software to manage. Rely on the web browser. Users can share and interact with their documents just from the browser.
– … collaborate securely in the cloud
– … documents managed and secured according to your company policies.

4. IBM Social Documents strategy – when and where you need documents in context.
– … Open Document format.
– … Interoperability with OOXML and MS Office binary file formats.

5. What is IBM Docs? Web-based collaborative editors for creating, sharing, and collaboratively authoring word processor documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Provides real-time co-editing, author presence awareness, commenting and discussions inside the document, etc.
– Available via IBM SmartCloud Engaged Advanced, or as an add-on with SmartCloud Engage and SmartCloud Connections.
– IBM Connections
– IBM Greenhouse

6. Demos:
– Open IBM Connections. Open the Files application.
– Open a file page.
– Can create a new document, spreadsheet, or presentation directly in IBM Connections.
– Can edit directly in IBM Docs, via a single click.
– @style commenting within IBM Docs, to give assignments / to do items.
– Can filter within the document on what you have been assigned, or things you have given to others in the @style.
– Can save templates into a folder, and when opening it, you can seamlessly create a new / plain version of the document. It is saved directly into your files area.

7. Development themes in 2013 (note that these are planned future items):
– Revision management – new and improved ways of handling draft editions of a document / presentation / spreadsheet. Compare and contrast two documents, with copy and paste between them.
– Drawing tools
– Charts
– Observer role. There is a limit of 5 concurrent co-authoring editors. A new observer role will allow other people to observe what’s happening. Can easily switch between editing and observing.
– Integration of Sametime chat.
– ECM FileNet integration. Will add more integrations – eg., to Analytics – in the future.
– Upgrades to the Assignments area. Eg., assignment of sections to a specific person. Visual tracking of progress on content creation and review. Sections can be assigned to “write” or “review.”
– … will also integrate assignment alerts into the Activity Stream in IBM Connections.
– Improved access on mobile devices – such as File Sync for offline access, and then synchronization back to the online edition.
– Integration with Connections Mail.
– OOXML export.

8. Beyond 2013 – will focus on better integration between Web meetings and co-editing sessions.

9. IBM Docs on mobile devices (demo’ing a soon-to-be-released update):
– … can select a file for offline access.
– … create a comment.
– … touch-enabled updates to a document / spreadsheet / presentation, and creating sticky notes as comments.