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


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I am taking advantage of this blog to tell that for the second year in a row I have been selected as a speaker! I know that I am still a rookie compared to many of the other presenters (just read there are many people doing their 13th LS, while I am at 4) but believe me, this is a great accomplishment for me. I feel very honored that my session has been accepted. Maybe I am not THAT bad after all
I will tell you what I am talking about, just in case you have nothing better to do ( doubt it, this year content is really exceptional from what I have seen ).
My session is in the Hands-on track :
Title: IBM Lotus Domino NSFDB2: Development and Integration Hands-On
Roberto Boccadoro
Giancarlo Giannini
We will have labs that you can do on creation of DB2 Access Views and Query Views as a starter, then we will dig deeper on the topic of how to leverage this features to achieve a better integration of Domino and Websphere Portal and there will be labs on how to do this using click-to-action and personalization.
Hope to see someone in the room 
RoB
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Cool, or what?

 

     On this theme:  Last week I wanted to collect ideas from my colleagues for topics to cover in an upcoming presentation on ND7.
     I could have just sent out an email and asked everyone to email me back.  Instead, I set up a Domino Wiki (using the template provided on OpenNTF), then sent a link to the Wiki to everyone.
     This not only let people provide anonymous feedback, but "the medium is the message"; it puts out the idea that "hey, you can do a Wiki in Notes!"  (In some cases, it gets the message across, too, that there is such a thing as a Wiki, and here's how it behaves.)

     Now looking for other opportunities to dazzle my colleagues.

 

Update:  forgot to give the link for this campaign, on Julian Robichaux's blog.

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It is the dawn of Day Three at the US Fencing Association's Coaches College session for Level I Foil coach certification.  I'm surrounded by athletes in peak condition from various sports.  I'm no longer sucking in my gut when I walk around the campus, though.  I'm letting myself appreciate the view instead of comparing myself to what I see.

 

As I said in the last entry, it's amazing to me.  We're all from rival clubs who will try to beat each other soundly during the coming months.  Yet here we are, working with each other to help each other become better coaches.  It turns out I'm one of the more experienced fencers here (although mostly in sabre, not foil, and at a mediocre skill level).  Many people here have only been fencing for a few years.  In some cases, they took up fencing because they teach at schools which needed fencing coaches, so they've had very little time to learn the sport.  On the other end are people who have competed at high-level tournaments, who are moving into coaching.  All of us will return home and stand before a group of beginning students, who have only seen fencing in the movies.  We'll all face a similar challenge:  How do we help these people add skills to their interest?  Can we encourage some of our students to move from interest to passion?

 

Here we aren't competitors, but collaborators.

 

Two months from now?  Different story!

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I'm leaving tomorrow for Colorado Springs, where I will spend a week at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, participating in the U.S. Fencing Association's Coaches' College. Forty or so of us will be working for our Level I Foil Coach certification. I went to this last year for Sabre Coach certification (sabre being my weapon of choice), so this year I have a better idea of what to expect. I'm really excited about it.

Interesting thing, though: forty or so of us, all learning the same techniques to become better coaches, so that we can train our fencers to beat each other. We're competitors, in a very real sense, and yet we're coming together to help each other become better coaches.

By coincidence, various members of the Notes/Domino design community are thrashing out a plan to collaborate on competitive template development. See John Head's blog for details about this. Sounds familiar? We're all competitors: we work for rival consulting firms, or for rival companies. Why would we share all our best stuff with people who might otherwise be willing to pay us for it?

Reasonable question. In both cases, I think we understand that we need to collaborate to build an environment in which we can compete effectively. It does me no good to train fencers if they have nobody to fence from other clubs. It does the sport no good if fencing is this secret, elite activity. The sport grows when there are more active clubs with knowledgeable coaches, who can collectively raise the skill level of the overall group of participants.

Likewise, if Notes/Domino designers can work together to pool their knowledge to build better applications, we can drive the market to recognize the strengths of the Notes/Domino platform, and that's good for all of us.

Anyway, I'm off.
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One of my early entries here was titled "Bad Design".  My opinion remains much the same:  the number one problem facing Notes/Domino environments is bad design.  Some recent discussions in the Lotus Notes/Domino Blog Universe seem to focus on IBM's part in this.  IBM, it  is said, gives us lousy templates, which can't stand up to what else is out there in the marketplace.  I'm thinking, though, that we developers need to take ownership of the design process, and start dazzling our customers.

 

The first thing we think of when we think "design", of course, is the appearance of something.  I tend to dismiss appearance, myself, but that's a personal bias.  I know it's important, but I have a hard time bringing myself to care much about whether a particular background is this color or that, or whether Arial is a better font than Helvetica.  Frankly, as long as I can read it with my bad eyesight, that's enough for me.  If everything were black or blue text on a white screen, I'd be satisfied.  That's not enough for everyone, though, and so it's important for me to be able to get help prettying things up when I need it.

 

The more interesting part of design to me, though, is the Structure.  What are the parts?  What comes in?  What goes out?  How do all the moving parts fit together?  These are the things that, to me, make it possible to tell a good design from a bad one.  Does the application do what it's supposed to do?  When I click on this button, what happens, and is it everything I expect to happen?

 

Quite frankly, I don't expect IBM to know how to do this for me or my company.  Sure, it'd be nice if IBM had, say, a Notes/Domino template for project management, but just try deploying one in most companies.  The arguments start.  Which project management methodology to use?  Which pieces of the method do we really need, and which are a waste of time?  Can we really afford to train everyone to use a PM tool?  And so forth.  If the IBM tool differs from the method the company decides to deploy, what then?  The great thing about Domino is the ability to customize, or even to throw out a design completely and build from scratch.

 

I get more value, quite frankly, from OpenNTF and the Notes designer forums than from the templates IBM builds for me.  I also experience a lot of frustration dealing with the out-of-the-box tools some companies throw at me; whenever I get an upgrade of MS Word or Excel, I end up having to switch off a bunch of features someone half a continent away decided I need.  I'm not so sure I want IBM spending a lot of time going down the same path.

 

To me the New Black is collaboration, and that includes collaboration with other designers and professionals who are out here doing business and building tools to do business.

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Writing this minutes after the match. Hope everybody saw what a great game it turned out to be.The overtimes were wonderful and we got to the final!!!!
Sorry for the eventual German readers, bear with a very happy Italian

In case somone from Mars does not get it : Italy 2 - Germany 0 in the World cup semifinals
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But I keep reading in fellow bloggers sites opinions and comments on the World Cup so I want to express my opinion and ask a question.
1) Go Italy!!!!! Finally a good and well deserved win.
2) Have you seen a better match than Italy-Ukraine ? Don't tell me that Germany-Argentina was better, please.....
RoB
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