IBM Connections Mobile App extension for Kudos Badges

Team Kudos has been busy working away on some great new initiatives in the lead up to IBM Connect 2013. One of the new capabilities that we have delivered is Kudos Badges Mobile. We have leveraged the new features that IBM provided with the IBM Connections 4 Mobile App that enable us to extend the App to include additional features, in this case Kudos Badges Mobile. This is a great capability as it provides seemless integration between IBM Connections Mobile App and Kudos Badges without the users having to have a separate App. We also have been able to leverage the authentication via the Connections App so users don't need to logon again.

One of the key strengths of Kudos Badges is that it has always tracked actions and behaviour for users of not only the Connections browser interface but also the Connections Mobile App (and the API usage for that matter). With the uptake of Mobile users continually increasing and IBM treating the Connections Mobile App as a first class user interface option, if you arn't measuring and rewarding your mobile users usage then you are missing a large portion of your audience. That is why we decided it was important to also provide the Kudos Badges Mobile App so our users can also participate and see how they rank with their peers.

Here are a few screen shots as well as a video providing a quick overview.

Kudos Badges Mobile AppKudos Badges Mobile App Menu

Kudos Badges Mobile App Badges

Kudos Badges Mobile App Leaderboard

Kudos Badges Mobile App Thanks

We have a few other exciting annoucements (....think IBM Notes Social Edition) to make over the next few days leading up to IBM Connect 2013. If you have any questions or would like to learn more you can contact us or come visit Team Kudos at Booth C49 at the IBM Connect conference.

IBM Connections 4 and Kudos Badges!

With the release of IBM Connections 4 we are very pleased to also release full support for Kudos Badges and Kudos Thanks on Connections 4.

Our Kudos Team has been working busily away for the last couple of months quitely working on ensuring Kudos is fully supported on Connectiosn 4! In addition though they have been excitedly taking advantage of new capabilities in Connections 4 such as embedded experiences and the OpenSocial Activity Stream. Some awesome new features such as being able to "Like" and Comment on badges and awards that users have received from Kudos. These capabilities really do add significant value to our mission of encouraging User Adoption of IBM Connections! We look forward to working with our clients all around the world to upgrade to Connections 4 in the coming weeks!

So to show off the new capabilities we prepared the following video and screenshots of Kudos Badges for IBM Connections 4!

Kudos Badges Leaderboard for IBM Connections 4Kudos Badges Profiles for IBM Connections 4Kudos Thanks for IBM Connectoins 4

If you would like to trial Kudos Badges (on either IBM Connections 3 or 4!) let us know!

ISW brings Peer to Peer recognition to IBM Connections with Kudos Thanks!

There is nothing quite as simple as saying "Thank You" to provide some recognition of great work. Think about it for a moment...when somebody thanks you for your great idea, or for putting in that extra work to meet a deadline, or maybe for just being a good team mate, it makes you feel great and more motivated to stay engaged.

That is why ISW has developed Kudos Thanks, the peer to peer and team recognition tool for IBM Connections. I am very pleased to be annoucing the general availability of Kudos Badges 1.4, our July release, which includes the great new capability of Kudos Thanks.

Kudos Thanks for IBM Connections

Well actually the real reason we have built Kudos Thanks as part of the Kudos Badges for IBM Connections product is that our customers have asked us to! We are continuing to work with our clients to identify how we can grow and add to Kudos Badges and it was clear that the ability for users to provide recognition and feedback to their colleagues was high on the list of requested features.

From the Kudos Badges web site:

Motivate your team

We all do performance reviews (or we all should!), however often the problem is that the various achievements or small goals we meet throughout the year can be easily forgotten. Why wait for the next big meeting to provide some feedback to your team. Kudos Thanks enables you to provide real time feedback and to publically acknowledge great work quickly and easily. The recognition then stays visible on the person's profile so that peers and colleagues can see and recognise the value that is placed on a persons work.

Peer to Peer recognition

Thanks doesn't always come from your boss either! Often having your direct peers thank you for some great work can be a great motivator. With Kudos Thanks users of IBM Connections can select from a range of Thanks related badges, choose who to award the thanks to, add a message and send it off! The thanks will appear on the users profile as well as integrate within their Activity Steam so that others can see as well.

Management or Team recognition

Kudos Badges also allows for Manager or Team Leader Thanks Badges. You can create your own special badges that only certain people can award such as employee of the month. And because Kudos Thanks is built to be social within IBM Connections peers and colleagues are able to see and add value to the recognition and thanks as well!

I also prepared a quick video providing a demo of Kudos Thanks. If you can get past my Aussie accent it should explain how it all works!

Kudos Thanks is the first step in some great plans we have for the second half of this year to keep innovating around IBM Connections and Kudos Badges so let us know what you think!

Future of the Shop Window - with Kudos Badges

Over on Sandy Carter's blog there is a post about a very innovative initiative that the team at Collaboration Matters and IBM have put together to present the future of the shop window - Social Retail Storefront. What a fantastic concept and use of Social Media to bring customers at the shop front closer to the brand, and extend the relationship via an IBM Connections Community moving forward.

Also very pleased to see an innovative implementation of Kudos Badges for IBM Connections to encourage participation within that Community with customised badges and rewards for the customers that participate.

Congratulations to Collaboration Matters and IBM for showing their thought leadership again!

Sogeti boosts adoption of IBM Connections with Kudos Badges

Sogeti has selected ISW's Kudos Badges for IBM Connections to help accelerate their worldwide adoption of IBM Connections. Sogeti is a leading provider of professional technology services, specializing in Application Management, Infrastructure Management, High-Tech Engineering and Testing. With 20,000 employees across 15 countries Sogeti is an outstanding example of an organisation that gets Social Business and is leveraging IBM Connections to drive business value throughout their organisation. Sogeti also understands the importance of having strong user adoption strategies to ensure that they are able to deliver that business value. We are very proud that Sogeti has chosen Kudos Badges as part of their strategy to help them continue their adoption of IBM Connections and to "Boost/Accelerate" their Social Business evolution.

“Sogeti was one of the first companies in the world, as early as 2009, to implement Connections, IBM’s leading social collaboration platform. Since then, the company has undertaken a fast-paced evolution towards becoming a social business by focusing strongly on the adoption of the tool. Today, proud of their 10,000 users, they have decided to give a boost / accelerate this evolution by implementing a gamification solution called Kudos Badges by ISW. Indeed, generating adoption and in-depth usage of the tool at the scale of 20,000 people spread across 15 countries is a challenge. Sogeti thus believes that gaming power can attract more users but also can help its people to gain a better understanding of the tool’s functionalities and therefore improve the usage they make of it.”

Lucile Leclercq
Global Social Collaboration Driver | Sogeti Group

As Sogeti is a multinational organisation the requirement to support users across a variety of languages is essential. Kudos Badges 1.3 released in April this year delivered full support for multilingual deployments of IBM Connections. With the ability to support all 25 languages supported by IBM Connections, ISW has already translated Dutch, German, French, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), and are working to shortly also deliver Dannish, Spanish, Thai, Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish. The way the language module of Kudos has been developed clients are easily able to add their own translations for Kudos, as well as completely change the language and words used throughout the entire solution.

Another key capability of Kudos Badges that is key is the fact that Kudos Badges is "Content Aware". I am going to blog more about this shortly however in brief Kudos Badges is able to be targetted to reward users for actions around specific Communities, or specific Content and People within IBM Connections. This is essential in ensuring that the users aren't just rewarded for actions and the quantity of activity but more importantly quality of activity and content created. For example if you upload a File you may be awarded some points. If someone comments, recommends, or downloads that file then they may also be awarded some points, but importantly the creator of that file could also be awarded additional points as the content has been deemed valuable by their peers. It isn't just the actions that have been taken but importantly the actions in context that gain rewards. This capability also allows us to build rewards and drive motivation within specific Connections Communities or forums. More on this later...

The ISW team and I are very much looking forward to working with Sogeti to implement Kudos Badges and learning together from our combined extensive experience in driving real value from the IBM Connections platform.