TeamPark and Lotus Connections 2.5
Since early april IBM has been running a managed beta for their next big release of Lotus Connections. Version 2.5 is officially set to come this friday, the 28th and we've been fidgetting around with this beta version since the beginning. Time to have a quick look at what's new.
The biggest changes compared to LC 2.0.1 are the addition of two new services: Files and Wiki's, but there are lots of minor changes as well. I won't go into too much detail on the specs, there are probably dozens of sites who will do so, I'd rather share a glimpse of what we've done with it in our project called TeamPark.
In the image below you'll see the main services for Connections: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, Files, Wiki's Bookmarks and Activities. In yellow (the middle part) you'll see the new, cool, microtweeting like functionality of Connections 2.5
One of the big advantages of Connections is that it is people centered and not document centered, like Microsoft Sharepoint. You can tag about everything, including people so that it becomes very easy to find experts. Obviously, it is very important to stimulate everyone to fill in their profile details, so we added a few things to the default Connections 2.5 implementation. On the left hand side you'll see two widgets below the profile picture (oui, c'est moi). The first is the standard Tagcloud for your profile (which is minimized now) which we use to find expertise and interest. At Sogeti, we work for different customers all the time so we added a "MyClients" widget. We added an extra field to the profile page where we can fill in the Clients we've worked for, and they appear in the bottom left widget "MyClients" This way we can easily find who's been working at a specific client to get references.
A second Widget we've made is to stimulate everyone to fill in their profile information and is a Profile % Complete counter, quite similar to what you'll find on LinkedIn. Currently my profile is 51% complete as you can see in the right column. Basically the widget counts which profile fields have been filled in, and assigns a weight to that. Obviously a profile picture carries more weight than the phone number of my (sadly) non-existent Assistant.
So, that's it for a first view of the Sogeti TeamPark platform based on Connections 2.5. More to follow.
Labels: beta, ibm, Lotus Connections, sharepoint, sogeti, teampark