IBM Connections

Creating a new world of possibilities

IBM® Connections is a leading social software platform that can help your organization engage the right people, accelerate innovation and deliver results. This integrated, security-rich platform helps people engage with networks of experts in the context of critical business processes. Now everyone can act with confidence and anticipate and respond to emerging opportunities.

IBM Connections deployment options include on premises, hybrid and in the cloud.

IBM Connections can help you:

  • Make everything social and bring your brand to every experience. This social platform can integrate social into your business processes throughout your entire customer experience.
  • Eliminate guesswork by providing full-featured social analytics and metrics to foster vital networks and communities.
  • Unlock creativity everywhere with a social platform that is ready to be delivered to virtually any mobile device including tablets. IBM Connections provides a flexible and security-rich foundation for a comprehensive bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy.
  • Integrate with IBM software and third-party applications to extend your enterprise social business platform.
  • Integrate with Microsoft applications including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Windows Explorer, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Make everything social and bring your brand to every experience

  • Activity streams provide a list of recent, relevant social and integrated business process activities occurring in your personal network or community. You can view and quickly take action on content and events in context, without navigating to another process or application.
  • Embedded experience allows you to work in a single, familiar environment. This feature provides access to business critical actions from a wide variety of applications including third-party applications.
  • IBM Connections Mail is a new, simple and compelling way to perform essential email and calendar tasks right from IBM Connections, your social software platform. IBM Connections Mail helps empower a 21st century workforce by creating a social email experience.
  • Integrated email and calendar allows you to access both IBM Domino® and Microsoft Exchange messaging services. This feature brings mail and calendar into your social context by integrating key messaging and calendar views and functions into your social environment.

Eliminate guesswork

  • Access a full-featured set of social analytics for Connections components in the form of reports and recommendations.
  • Discover trends in content, social activity and expertise to help you make better, more informed decisions and deepen relationships.
  • Discover who and what you need to know via recommendations.
  • Drive positive and productive adoption to keep customers, partners and employees engaged, contributing and valued.

Unlock creativity everywhere

Integrate with IBM software and third-party applications

  • Extend your social business solution by accessing people and information in many of your existing IBM software such as IBM Sametime® and IBM Notes® Social Edition.
  • Connect an IBM Connections community to IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems including IBM FileNet® Content Manager and IBM Content Manager.
  • Delight customers by infusing social into their experience of your brand through integration with the IBM Customer Experience Suite. The IBM Employee Experience Suite brings social capabilities to the employee web experience to enable effective collaboration.
  • Use IBM Connections to collaborate with stakeholders in the software development process. Connections integrates with IBM Rational® Team Concert™ to help development teams work together more effectively.
  • Add security and real-time policy management controls with Vantage for IBM Connections.

Integrate with Microsoft applications

See how to add full-featured social capabilities to Microsoft SharePoint (00:02:55)

Use the IBM Connections Plug-In to enhance Microsoft SharePoint environments with additional social and collaborative functionality.

Facilitate easier sharing of any file on the desktop with the Windows Explorer extension for IBM Connections Files.

Extend Microsoft Office with social capabilities using IBM Connections Plug-ins.

Bring social capabilities to Microsoft Outlook using the IBM Connections Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. View a demo (00:05:55)

IBM Connections resources

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IBM Connections

Creating a new world of possibilities

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Providing a rich social content and document management experience

IBM® Connections v4.5 social software for business provides an exceptional social software solution that is designed to help enable users to access the right people and internal and external content in your professional networks and communities. IBM Connections is designed to help users engage with networks of expertise in the context of critical business processes in order to act with confidence and anticipate and respond to emerging opportunities.

IBM Connections V4.5 adds platform support for IBM WebSphere® Application Server V8 and DB2® 10, along with support for the IBM i operating system.

IBM Connections v4.5 provides:

New features designed to enhance your social experience.

Additional benefits to help accelerate productivity, enhance collaboration and improve data management in a security-rich environment.

Social content management with IBM Connections Content Manager to add content management and document management capabilities. IBM Connections Content Manager is a separately priced add-on offering for IBM Connections 4.5. Learn more at  http://www-142.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/connections-content-mgr/

Social content management benefits when you add IBM Connections Content Manager. Also provides a seamless growth path to even more robust IBM Enterprise Content Management capabilities.

New features

  • You can like status updates and comments about status updates directly from the activity stream in your community.
  • You can use the @mention feature to mention your colleagues in status updates or status update comments and share your news directly with them. This feature can help encourage people to respond to the update thread and participate in the conversation.
  • New features in ideation blogs let you export ideas from your community's ideation blog to a file. You can also mark an idea as a duplicate and combine votes with the corresponding idea.
  • Forums make it easier for users to share information and collaborate with others. Users can use the like feature to recommend a forum topic or reply. Users can sort lists of forum topics by the number of likes, number of replies, or by date modified.
  • New mobile applications are available for iOS, Android, and Blackberry devices.

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Additional benefits

  • Increased data protection, scalability, and performance for all database intensive operations is provided. IBM Connections 4.5 is designed to help manage data more effectively and efficiently.
  • Enhanced ideation capabilities are designed to help encourage users to submit ideas and better manage the idea from concept to production.
  • Microsoft Outlook users can benefit from the new social capabilities directly from their inbox, bringing the social platform to users virtually anywhere they work.
  • Files stored in the mobile device are encrypted. Administrators can issue a remote wipe command, if needed, with no additional software required.

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Social content management with IBM Connections Content Manager

  • Community owners can now create content libraries directly form a community.
  • Users can create multiple libraries in a community. Community libraries provide traditional content library capabilities such as check-in and check-out, version control, access control, and approval routing.
  • Community libraries provide rich social features including tagging, following, liking, commenting and download history.
  • Community content libraries are searchable from across IBM Connections.
  • Community members can stay current with content updates from the community activity stream.

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Social content management benefits

  • Liberates organizational content, which can help drive improved decision making and business results.
  • Helps engage people to collaborate as part of the content creation process, while they are working in their social environment.
  • Allows you to locate and access content more quickly using the integrated capability for searching across all social and enterprise content.
  • Improves content quality through enhanced feedback and collaboration. This is made possible via social features such as tagging, rating, and recommendations.
  • Elevates confidence and trust in content using the integrated features for review and approval routing.

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    Home page

    See what is happening across your social network and access the social data that is important to you.

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    Profiles

    Find and discover the expertise you need.

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    Communities

    Work together with people who have common interests, roles and expertise. Also includes ideation, media gallery, and bridging capabilities.

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    Blogs

    Present your ideas, receive feedback and make the most of the experience and opinions of others.

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    Bookmarks

    Find, save and share useful web-based content.

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    Mail

    Bring information and experts immediately into view by easily sharing conversations that would have otherwise been hidden in email, for faster and more informed decision-making.

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    Activities

    View, manage and organize tasks and quickly complete them. Tap into your professional network.

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    Wikis

    Create and share content together with your teams and professional network.

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    Files

    Share documents, presentations and other files with your colleagues. Now you can eliminate system duplicates and reduce the amount of mail in your inbox.

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    Forums

    Exchange ideas with others and benefit from their expertise.

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    Social Analytics

    Discover who and what you need to know through recommendations.

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