INFORM (AusLUG) 2015 - Call for Speakers and Sponsors

Well the team from AusLUG are back and they have announced INFORM 2015 will be running in Melbourne on 11th & 12th June. AusLUG has run 3 times previously in Sydney, Melbourne, and then Brisbane.

So if you are working with IBM Collaboration Solutions - Connections, Notes/Domino, Forms, Portal, Smartcloud then you simply must attend! There is a great community of customers, partners and IBMers in Australia around these technologies so collectively we have a lot to learn from one another.

Each time it has had a great attendance so it is awesome that we have it back in Melbourne again. I am sure there will be two full days of great content......which brings me to the first point:

CALL FOR SPEAKERS - Don't hold back. We want to hear about your experiences. IBM speakers, Partners, Customers, Overseas, Local. It is all good. Have an idea around user adoption of Connections? xPages Development, Extending and Integrating, Bluemix, Forms Experience Builder, Business Sessions, Technical Sessions, or even something from left field that might be interesting. All ideas are welcome. If you are a new speaker don't fret! It is a great crowd of like minded people and I find more a discussion than a presentation. If you are not sure feel free to contact me and I would be happy to sound off with you about your idea for a session. For me I would love to see a lot more local content. I know for a fact that there are a lot of you out there with great knowledge and experiences to share. This is the place to do it!

Here is the Speaker Invitation - All you need to do is Register Here and then log into AusLUG to Propose your Session.

Now onto the second point:

CALL FOR SPONSORS - Let me cut to it. ISW has sponsored AusLUG every year as a Gold Sponsor and it is worth it. We mingle with our clients, we meet new prospects, we demonstrate our capabilities, and at the end of the day we want to support this community of ours. These events do not happen without the sponsors, and I have found that the attendees support the sponsors by listening to what we have to offer. IBM have backed this years event as a platinum sponsor and ISW is committed to going Gold again. The organisers of the event do it for the love of it but they need some $ to make it all happen. So if you have offerings that compliment the IBM Collaboration in Australia then this is the event for you to get in front of users, customers, partners, and IBMers that are continuing to invest in the technology. So for more information here is the Sponsorship Pack.

So get involved. Lock in the dates. See you there!

This thing just keeps getting better......Social Connections 8

WOW! What an incredible agenda planned for Social Connections in Boston. The team has truly outdone all previous agenda's, so very exciting.

Here is the just published agenda - http://socialconnections.info/agenda/

I first attended the Social Connections event in Amsterdam a few years ago and it was a great event then. So much so that I have then attended every Social Connections since in Stockholm, Prague, and Switzerland. Now to be clear I have travelled almost 40hrs each way to get to each of these events. Hobart - Sydney - Dubai - Europe and return! It really is worth the effort. Not only is the agenda excellent, the networking opportunity of like minded Social Collaboration experts is like no other event I have attended. And the Social Connections team always puts on an awesome dinner at some exotic location that I always say to myself "just look where I am!".

I would say to anyone that is engaged around IBM Connections and Enterprise Social Networks as a whole that this is the event you want to attend. For those lucky USA based individuals that are getting to host this next event in Boston you are mad if you don't make the effort to get there! I will be travelling the 34000 odd KM to get there and back:)

Surrounded by the people

Woke up this morning to see this post by Panagenda and again by Stuart.

It is a funny thing you know. To see your photo surrounded by such an amazing group of people. Gurus, Friends, Champions.........Family. And there are so many others that arn't in that montage. How lucky are we all

I really do not know another community like this one. I do know that many are worried about the future. When will we meet again? Where?.............I am not worried. I am quite certain we will find another sushi serving karaoke bar where ever we go. And I for one will be embrassing it. Location is irrelevant. People is everything.

Who should be part of my IBM Connections Community? Kudos Insights knows!

One of the challenges many organisations have is the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing;)

How many times have you made a call on a customer to then realise that one of your colleagues called on them a week before?

How many times have you been working on a project or research only to realise that someone else in the organisation, maybe located elsewhere, has been working on the same task, or even already done it?

IBM Connections is a great tool for breaking down these communication barriers however even still sometimes we just don't make the connections needed to keep the communication flowing.

Lets look at the customer example above. How about we create a Connections Community around the customer so we can get everyone on the same page and make sure we approach the customer in a consistent manner. Great idea. That will work. However how do we know who to invite to the Community? We already know some of the people involved, but in many cases not everyone. How do we know when someone from a different departmentor division of our organisation is working to sell to another division/department within our customer's organisation? This can happen all the time in big or small organisations. Well the answer to how we know is Kudos Insights!

Kudos Insights is a relationship analytics tool that helps you to make connections and find the right people to be involved in. No longer do we have the problem of not knowing who is communicating with a customer/supplier/partner, or talking about a particular project or topic. From the brochure:

Kudos Insights enables organisations to rapidly build communities in IBM Connections by identifying potential members to invite into the community based on a common interest such as a customer account or a project. Kudos Insights can help community managers instantly answer the question “who else in the organisation has recently connected with a client” or “who else is involved in a particular project” such that they can be invited to join that community.

The community manager can then reach out to the individual and invite them to be part of the community. This is very powerful for organisations that are spread across multiple locations and have limited real account visibility.

So how does it work? Again the brochure tells it well:

Kudos Insights leverages the TrustSphere relationship analytics capability. The TrustVault™ Relationship Analytics server integrates with existing email infrastructure such as IBM Domino® or Microsoft® Exchange®. Relationship data extracted from the email infrastructure is transmitted using a secure API to Kudos Insights and is used to provide essential Relationship Analytics for your organisation. Only metadata is analyzed in order to protect employee privacy and confidentiality. TrustVault™ Relationship Analytics server can be run either as a cloud service (such as on SoftLayer), or can also be installed on premise.

Well here are a couple of screenshots for you:

IBM Connections - Kudos Insights Community BuilderIBM Connections - Kudos Insights My Network Builder

We of course will be at IBM ConnectED in Florida in a few days time so if you are attending come and see Kudos Insights live at our showcase pedastal - B29! We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. And don't forget you can win a Sonos PLAY:1 while you are at it;)

Kudos Boards 1.2 - Linked Boards,To Do Progress,Board Templates & more...

During the bustling time of the Xmas and New Year period the Kudos team were busy putting the finishing touches on our latest release of Kudos Boards for IBM Connections. It is a great release incorporating some new ideas and feedback from our clients around the globe. We are at a point now with Kudos Boards of not just focusing on making Connections Activities more intuitive and productive for users, but also focusing on creating additional features and capabilities that make Activities really rock.

I have recorded the following quick video to demonstrate just a few of the new features and I will also grab a few screenshots below.

Link Cards to Board

One of the challenges with Activities is that sometimes a single Task can be a full project in themselves. Often it is the case that not everyone in the Activity needs to see all of this detail and just want to know about the overall task being done. Do you have tasks that are really a project in themselves?  Now you can manage that To-Do in a whole other Board.  Simply create a 'Board' type card, and either create a new board or select an existing board. The To Do Card is still on the Original Board however you can also link directly to the more detailed Linked or Associated Board to drill down into the specifics of that task. Very cool!

Tile Progress bars (complete, overdue, incomplete)

Have a lot of Activities. Want to see a snap shot of the progress across them all? See at a glance your progress through all your Boards, and whether any items are overdue!  Hover on the bars to see the overview for the status of y our tasks.

Update window title based on page

Have multiple Kudos Boards tabs open?  Finding it hard to keep track what is what?  Now you can easily distinguish between different Board tabs you have open.

Added Multilingual Support

With our clients coming from all around the world multilingual support is important of course. When we first built Kudos Boards we did so in a manner to support different languages and we have finished this off. The first alternate language thanks to our great partner Whitesoft is Czech.

So if you would like to check out the new features or have a trial contact us via the Kudos web site. We would also love to hear your ideas on how else we can improve Kudos Boards and IBM Connections Activities. Last of all we will be exhibiting at IBM ConnectED 2015 in a week so come by have a look. Oh and don't forget you can win a Sonos PLAY:1!