Welcome Maria Nordin to ISW & Kudos!

Now this is exciting! I am so very happy to welcome Maria Nordin to the ISW team. Many in the IBM Connections community knows Maria well. Maria is one of the leaders behind the amazing Social Connections team, and comes to us from a great company Infoware in Sweden where she was the Product Manager for Domain Patrol Social. Maria will be joining us from August 20th starting with a trip to Australia to get up and running(....away from the dreaded Australian Drop Bears Maria;)

Maria will be taking on the role of leading our business development activities in Europe working with our many and growing Kudos and Buzzy customers in that part of the world. It will be great to finally have someone in that timezone that can have daily contact with our wonderful customers. With Maria's passion and background around Connections, Watson Workspace, and Social Business/Collaboration, we are also looking forward to her ideas around making our solutions even better. Europe has always been a great market for Kudos and we have many successful customers over there so it is wonderful that we can provide a higher level of service to them as well.

And of course Maria is also an IBM Champion for ICS! This brings the number of champions at ISW to 4 with Jared Roberts, Jay Agrawal, and myself. How cool is that!

How many users access IBM Connections on mobile devices? - Kudos Analytics

Just posted a quick demo video of Kudos Analytics. We often get asked if we can report on how many users are accessing IBM Connections via a mobile device. The video demonstrates this and a few other related reports.

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;)

Check out Kudos at IBM ConnectED 2015 and WIN a SONOS!

Ok. I admit it. My name is Adam Brown and I am a Sonos Addict (just ask vowe). And now you can be as well:) Win a Sonos PLAY:1 wireless hifi at ConnectEd! These things are just awesome. I have just added two PLAY:1 to my growing Sonos collection at home. They certainly pack some punch and hooked up to Spotify/Pandora/Deeza/Radio/more.... will give you "ALL THE MUSIC ON EARTH".

The Australian team (and Tony from UK;) at ISW and Kudos are giving away a Sonos PLAY:1 at IBM ConnectED to one lucky conference delegate. Kudos/ISW is making the annual pilgrimage to Orlando for the IBM ConnectED so we hope to see you there. We have some very exciting new features for Kudos that we are sure our IBM Connections clients are going to love.

The pitch from Sonos:

"The Sonos system offers deep, crystal clear HiFi sound in a compact and surprisingly powerful unit and can stream all your music library, popular music providers and internet radio; all controlled from your smartphone. You can even add your prize to more Sonos units to build a system for your entire home or workplace!"

The pitch from us:

Be very careful;) While one Sonos is very awesome. Two is even better. Three.... one for the office....need one downstairs as well...maybe one we can use outside.....kitchen.....so consider yourself warned. You will not stop at just one of these puppies!

How do you get your hands on one of these beauties?

All you need to do to win is visit the Kudos team at Pedestal B29, scan your badge and collect one of our adorable Koala's souvenirs and maybe some Aussie chocolates (TIM TAM anyone). That is it. We will make a draw on the last day of the conference and notify the winner.

Kudos is an award-winning suite of applications designed to reward user adoption, measure performance and increase productivity for IBM Connection users. When entering the prize draw why not learn more about what Kudos can do for your organisation, face to face with the team, or check out our Youtube Kudos playlist.

And the nice thing about visiting us at Pedestal B29 is that you can then rock past Crossware at B30 and enter their very cool draw for an Apple Watch. @RobHollier I assume we can enter as well?

Kudos Boards for IBM Connections is ready to roll! Social Connections here we come!

Following on from the announcement of the pending release of Kudos Boards at IBM Connect 2014 we are now ready to roll!! I am very please to announce the full release of Kudos Boards. Post Connect we have been feverishly working away to finalise Kudos Boards for IBM Connections and have completed all of the capabilities we wanted to deliver in the initial release. We have had Boards in a pre-release pilot for the last couple of months, and have had heaps of feedback from our awesome customers and partners around the world. We have lots of additional capabilities we will be adding over the next few months however we feel it is now ready for showtime!

The Kudos mission is to increase the user adoption, measure performancea and ROI, and increase user productivity for IBM Connections. Our 4th Design Goal for Kudos is to Increase User Productivity Through Clever Design. And this is exactly where Kudos Boards is focused.

Kudos Boards creates a visual interface, based on the Kanban methodology, for IBM Connections Activities. Thru the use of a visual interface users are able to leverage the Activities capability in a more intuitive and personalized way. Drag and Drop, Click to Change, Quick and Easy. Sometimes Activities can become a little overwhelming for users....Soooo Many Activities......Soooo many tasks and entries.....where do I focus? Kudos Boards fixes this problem via the My Boards interface by enabling users to focus on what is important to them, sort and manage their Activities in a personalized way, colour code, categorise, pin boards, and access their important Activites/Boards quickly and easily. Once in a Board they can intereact and use the Activity in a more intuitive way. All the time keeping the Board automagically in sync with the Activity...in real time! Magically refreshing in front of your eyes. Very neat stuff! This will increase the usage of Activities, which will result in happier users, more engaged users, leading ulitmately to increase in adoption of Connections overall.

Off course a picture (or a video:) is worth a thousand words so I have recorded the below video showing the latest release of Boards.

I am just about to pack my bags for a trip to Social Connections so for everyone that is going to be there will be able to see Kudos Boards first hand. If you can't get there however please reach out to us via www.kudosbadges.com and we will be happy to provide a trial version or schedule a web demo just for you.