Powerful customization available in IBM Connections

Notifications are great, specially on a social platform they help you keep at pace with what is happening on your content. Which is critical for your persona in social space, after all you would like to know what is happening to content you post, is it being liked, commented upon (discussed), shared etc.
One problem with social platforms is that they do not provide sufficient mechanism to control these notifications. There is no way to mention if you would want notifications for a particular event, what kind of notification should that be, would you like to just have details of event like “User A commented on blog you posted” or would you want to have contents of the comment and blog as well.



IBM Connections fortunately is different and provides full capability to administrators for managing notifications and its contents. For this IBM Connections uses a a technology called templates or more popularly knows as Free marker templates. More can be read about templates on
IBM Connections Documentation page : Customizing Notifications
Details of Freemarker can be found here : What is Freemarker

Feel free to edit those template files based on what notifications you want and how you want them. Best of all you do not even need to restart servers if use Freemarker tool.

IBM Connections/ Social Cloud Mobile App

IBM just announced that latest update to the IBM Connections Mobile is now available in the app stores.

The app provides a native set of collaboration capabilities so you can work seamlessly with your team, anytime, anywhere.  In this update you will find that you have a new hidden navigation which provides for more on screen real estate.  The new navigation also can be personalized based on the individuals needs and preferences,  so that you can organize the navigation based on what is most important to you. Apart from overhaul of UI, new views include History, Blogboard, Favorites etc.

Android ( Google Play )
IPhone ( Apple Store )

New features of IBM Connections 5 release

IBM announced the new release of IBM Connections 5 for June 2014 including some new features like:

External Collaboration 

External users will only see content shared with them and only the people associated with that content. Administrators can see who is external and manage or invite them. External communities are explicitly flagged.  External members cannot be a community owner.  External users can see business cards but not profiles. External users can search but will not see public data returned nor can they see the company directory. External users are always flagged somehow in the view (name or icon). External files are also flagged in the community. 

Deployment: You edit LotusConnections-config.xml to enable “visitorModelEnabled” to True. You then restart the server.  Enable Waltz Profiles Integration (WPI) to make sure profiles_directory_service_extension_enabled is enabled in LotusConnections-config.xml 

Disable Anonymous Access for the Connections Instance 
Register external users into the Profiles DB 
Set employee.extended role 

Licensing: CCM not supported with External Collaboration. Only authorized users may provide External Users access to IBM Connections. 


Files 
Files gallery and preview : grid view of thumbnails. More information when hovering over the thumbnail. Information like Externally shared, public, private and more via thumbnail. Plus a quick access download link.  Files Gallery can be added to the community to showcase files.  IBM File Viewer is used to generate thumbnails (free download of 1.0.6). All the files will need to be converted. You can run wasadmin for existing content.  The Media Gallery can be migratred with a few steps. The Media Gallery Feature will no longer be able to be added to a community and replaced with the Gallery App. Existing Media Galleries will keep working. 

File sync: Sync to a native mobile app or desktop. Bandwidth can be taperd to Wifi only.  Desktop File sync can save directly to Connections from any desktop app. Round rip editing.  Using the web UI you can mark files to be available offline. File Sync requires Windows 7 or 8. Also available on iOS and Android since IBM Connections 4.5 CR4. Works for personal files. 



Some of the new additional features coming in C5:

• New Activity Stream algorithm to show relevant information
• View all notifications in one area
• Link Previews to summarize content
• See recent Collaboration Spaces you have accessed
• Users can now reorder the navigation how they want
• Mark content as important using a Star like Google Mail
• People Typeahead from the search bar using name
• Activity Stream Search to look for any content like hashtag and content
• Custom landing pages in communties
• Rich text editor with Ephox EditLive!
• Expanded @ mentions across blog comments, Ideation Blogs
• Activity stream updates include conversation updates/responses inline
• Use of hashtags in status update comments
• See threaded comments from the Forum Embedded Experience.
• Some Community updates including multiple ideation blogs and recovering deleted communities
• Threaded comments in blogs (finally) and the ability to edit blog comments

Furthermore a new release for IBM Docs ( 1.0.6 ) will also be released.