Lotus Connections 2.0 - A Deployment Portfolio

Lotus Connections 2.0 - A Deployment Portfolio
Stuart McIntyre
Collaboration Matters Limited
stuart@collaborationmatters.com
http://collaborationmatters.com
Twitter: stuartmcintyre

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

About me

• Technical Director of Collaboration Matters Limited

• Social Software Evangelist

• Blogger (lotusconnectionsblog.com etc)

• Connections/Quickr deployment specialist

• Tweeter (stuartmcintyre) - are you really not on Twitter yet? ;-)


Agenda

• What is Collaboration?

• What is a Collaborative Organisation?

• What technologies are needed?

• Where does Lotus Connections ﬁt?

• What will be the hurdles to overcome?

• Summary


What is Collaboration?

• Collaboration is:

• a recursive process where two or more people or organisations work
together toward an intersection of common goals — for example, an
intellectual endeavour that is creative in nature—by sharing
knowledge, learning and building consensus.

• Collaboration does not require leadership and can sometimes bring
better results through decentralization and egalitarianism. In particular,
teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources,
recognition and reward when facing competition for ﬁnite resources.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration


What makes a Collaborative Organisation?

• A collaborative organisation is one that has the following characteristics:

1.The values and objectives of employees and management are aligned,

2.A climate of mutual trust and respect exists,

3.The knowledge of all the staff, customers and suppliers is shared and
pooled to optimize the organisation's operations and opportunities,

4.Decision making is more decentralised than it is in most current
organisations and more stakeholders in the organisation play a role in
deﬁning the direction in which the organization moves, and

5.Hierarchical structures are kept to a minimum. The company is managed
democratically by consensus rather than by command and control.

From http://www2.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan/cqchin.doc


What makes a Collaborative Organisation?

• A collaborative organisation is one that has the following characteristics:

1.The values and objectives of employees and management are aligned,

2.A climate of mutual trust and respect exists,

3.The knowledge of all the staff, customers and suppliers is shared and
pooled to optimize the organisation's operations and opportunities,

4.Decision making is more decentralised than it is in most current
organisations and more stakeholders in the organisation play a role in
deﬁning the direction in which the organization moves, and

5.Hierarchical structures are kept to a minimum. The company is
managed democratically by consensus rather than by command and
control.
From http://www2.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan/cqchin.doc


What will be the key technologies required?

• First, technology is not the solution - it is part of the solution
• Must be embraced by cultural change, by business leadership and by user
education (not technical training)
• However, some technology will help:
• Social Proﬁles
• Communities of Practice
• Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management
• Collaboration ‘Places’
• Presence Awareness
• We’ll look at how they can be implemented in your organisation...


Where does Lotus Connections fit?

Social Profiles - Lotus Connections Profiles

Communities of Practice - Lotus Connections Communities

Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management - Lotus Connections Blogs,
Activities and Lotus Quickr Team Places (+ IdeaJam?)

Collaboration ‘Places’ - Lotus Quickr Team Places, ‘QuickrShare’,
Lotus Connections Activities

Presence Awareness - Lotus Connections / Sametime integration

Persistent Conversations - Lotus Sametime Advanced


Lotus Connections

• Lotus Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be
more effective and innovative by building dynamic networks of coworkers,
partners, and customers Activities
Homepage
Profiles

Communities Dogear

Blogs


Social Proﬁles
• So much more than “employee
whitepages”

• Tap into the knowledge capital
within your organisation

• Expand your personal network
- develop and maintain
personal relationships that
span obstacles like reporting
structure, department,
geography, etc.

• Proﬁles typically include a
person's photo, reporting
structure, name, pronunciation,
the time zone the person works
in, and information about the
individual's expertise and areas
of interest.


Surfacing Social Proﬁles

• Power of Social Proﬁles is seen when surfaced throughout your organisation -
always available ‘person card’, building context of where and why this
individual is important

• Intranet/Extranet/Internet

• Email (Lotus Notes/Outlook)

• IM (Sametime)


Beyond the Business Card

• Connections Profiles and ‘Person Card’ can be:

• Customised - include/exclude any of the default fields (Floor, Building etc),
add an almost unlimited number of custom fields (HR ID, Region etc)

• Extended - can link to other applications, systems

• Typed - can use multiple ‘Profile Types’ to display different information for
user groups (teachers/students, full-time/part-time etc.)

• Social - links to colleagues, to blogs, wikis, recent activities etc.


Social Profiles - An example

• An 900-employee advertising agency looking for:
• means to make it easier for employees to find others with specific skills
• saving costs by employee profile self-service
• faster time-to-value from meetings
• ability to personalise internal and external website content
• The solution?
• Connections Profiles with data integrated from HR systems
• Profiles business card integrated with Sametime, Notes and intranet
• Plans to integrate 3rd party systems (Twitter etc) in business card in a later
phase


Communities of Practice

communities of practice - an
environment connecting people and
encouraging the sharing of ideas
and experiences

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/stephendale/cop-conversations-to-collaboration-presentation


What is a Community of Practice

• A Community of Practice is a network of individuals with common problems
or interests who get together to explore ways of working, identify common
solutions, and share good practice and ideas.

• puts you in touch with like-minded colleagues and peers

• allows you to share your experiences and learn from others

• allows you to collaborate and achieve common outcomes

• accelerates your learning

• validates and builds on existing knowledge and good practice


Why Communities of Practice?

Communities of Practice are not about bringing knowledge into the
organisation but about helping to grow the knowledge that we need
internally within our organisations.


Communities
• Communities helps people who share a
common interest to collaborate by
exchanging and sharing information or
interacting with one another via their Web
browser, IBM Lotus Sametime, and email
software.

• Community bookmarks and Activities

• Discussion Forums

• Integration with supported wikis

• Integration with Lotus Sametime Advanced
(chat with other members and save chat
transcripts in the community's discussion
forum & send a broadcast message to a
community when they need a quick answer)


Some Community Types

• Helping Communities provide a forum for community members to help each
other with everyday work needs.

• Best Practice Communities develop and disseminate best practices,
guidelines, and procedures for their members use.

• Knowledge Stewarding Communities organise, manage, and steward a
body of knowledge from which community members can draw.

• Innovation Communities create breakthrough ideas, new knowledge, and
new practices.


Communities of Practice - An example

• An 2000-user academic institution looking for:
• method of sharing best practices amongst similar departments/job roles
across geographies
• creation of mailing lists/groups around areas of interest across
departmental boundaries
• discussion forums
• The solution?
• Connections Communities with planned wiki integration
• Quickr integration featuring team places and customised workﬂow
applications


Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management
• Working smarter together

• Generation and publication of ideas via blog posts
and development via comments and discussions

• It’s about creating a stronger, more participatory business culture that fosters
quick thinking and new ideas -> Web 2.0 technologies

• Mashups enable users to create situational applications that solve business
problems as they come up.

• Integration of innovation management tools via widgets
and plug-ins - e.g. IdeaJam.


Lotus Quickr 8.1.1: Lotus Connections Integration

• Add a wiki or team place to a community

• Membership integration between a community and its linked wikis and/or
team places

• New feeds to show wiki updates on the community's home page

• New links on a community's home page to open the wiki or team place

• New links in a team place or wiki to open the community's home page

• Add a Lotus Quickr document library to a Lotus Connections activity

• Publish a document from an activity into a Lotus Quickr document library


Collaboration ‘Places’

• Areas where users can collaborate on:

• documents

• events

• tasks

• projects


Quickr Services and Templates
Libraries

Quickly manage documents, forms, images, or other media in content libraries that you can manage and
share with others.

Team Discussions / Forums

Keep a journal or blog of your meetings or creating discussions on different topics effecting your team.

WIKIs (Shared Editable Pages)

A shared editing space that team members can use to create and manage content such as designs,
presentations, or other group material.

Team Calendar

Manage a community view of important events and activities that effect your team.

Lists

Lists are simple “databases” of information such as tasks, vacation days, team members, … that can be
used to manage information simply and quickly.

RSS / ATOM Feeds

Quickr provides the ability to integrate and render feeds from your favorite ATOM or RSS site as well as to
produce a feed into your favorite feed reader.
… Templates can be customized and extended
… and its easy to add new ones

Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management
- An example

• A 10,000-user ﬁnancial institution looking for:
• means to develop new products at a much lower cost
• including input from multiple departments and geographies
• faster process from conception to delivery
• review and approval in parallel rather than sequential process
• The solution?
• Connections Blogs with key R&D and product development teams/
individuals writing about their ideas and canvassing feedback
• Popular ideas moved into Connections Activities for more rigid
development/feedback process
• Evaluating IdeaJam to assist with obtaining ideas from wider circle of
employees (integrated into Connections homepage)


Presence Awareness

• Extends the power of presence to online applications, e.g. Quickr and
Connections

• Important aspect of ‘Person Card’ and within Connections Proﬁles

• Key element in building trust between individuals, especially across
organisational or geographic boundaries. Helps to ﬂatten hierarchical
structures by allowing connections directly between managers and staff.

• Click to chat and click to talk from within the context of business and social
applications


Persistent Conversations

• Keep a continuous discussion running on a speciﬁc topic with an interested
community of people — in the atmosphere of an informal conversation.
• Monitor the chat rooms to which you have subscribed, see how many people/
unread messages are in each, the number of unread messages or the number of
active participants.
• Keep yourself in the loop with alerts so you'll be notiﬁed when a group is discussing
keywords in which you're interested.
• Chat history makes it easy for you to get caught
up with what the group has been discussing if
you've been away.
• Save a transcript of the discussion so that
others can search for and see what you were
discussing, your group's insight and expertise.
• Save into Lotus Connections Communities
• Part of Lotus Sametime Advanced


Persistent Conversations - An example

• A 400-user IT Services organisation looking for:
• means to create ongoing informal conversations between all levels of staff
• creation of dynamic knowledge base based on archive conversations
• inclusion of off-site and mobile employees in ofﬁce-based interactions
• coverage of both general and interest-focused areas
• The solution?
• Lotus Sametime Advanced integrated with Lotus Connections
Communities
• Access via PCs and mobile devices


That’s the technology...

... how do I make it work?


Lotus Connections Functional Topology
Lotus Connections Service
Corporate LDAP Directory
IBM WebSphere Application Server
IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6
6.1 ® (including IBM HTTP Server)
IBM Lotus Domino 7.0.2 +
running on
Microsoft Active Directory 2003
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v4 ®
Sun Java™ System Directory Server 5.2®
Windows® 2003 Server®
Novell eDirectory 8.8
(Standard or Enterprise)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 ®
AIX 5.3.0.4 and later

Browser
Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0 + One or more
Mozilla Firefox 2.0+ on Windows, Linux, & Mac services…
IBM WebSphere Portal Homepage
Rich Clients Activities
IBM Lotus Notes Profiles
IBM Lotus Sametime RDMS
Dogear
Microsoft Office plug-ins IBM DB2 9.1 ® FP4
Blogs
Feed support Oracle 10g ®
Communities
Atom based Readers MS SQL Server
Custom Applications 2005 Enterprise
Web and Rich Clients Edition ®


Lotus Connections Self-Contained Pilot

• Supports only Windows 2003.

• Installation installs WAS 6.1.0.13 and DB2 Express.

• No LDAP is installed, and no integration with existing LDAP.

• Registered users are imported into the Self Contained Pilot via a text ﬁle.

• Maximum of 100 concurrent / 1000 registered users.

• Support for migrating data from this pilot to a production deployment.


Small System/Pilot Deployment

• Appropriate for deployment to workgroup, small business, small deployment
(to ~1,000 users)

• Add discrete HTTP Server for additional scalability (to ~3,000 users)


Clustered System

• Appropriate for enterprise deployments (~3,000+ users)


Some Connections deployment tips

• Ensure that OS patch level meet minimum requirements for:
• Application Server
• Database Server
• IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator
• LDAP Server
• (Check and check again!)
• Use DB2 as the RDBMS if possible. Oracle and SQL Server are supported, but DB2
much easier to diagnose problems and resolve issues - think “Black Box”
• Both Domino and Active Directory work well as LDAP. Choose a globally unique
identiﬁer you can maintain (usually uid on Domino, sAMAccountName on AD). Must
be single valued, unique and non-mutable.
• For large environments (> ~3,000 users) clustering/load balancing will be required,
but don’t let that put you off. Start small for Pilot purposes and scale from there.
• If your organisation already has RDBMS and/or J2EE/Websphere skills, embrace
them early - they can really help from day 1. But don’t panic - it can be thought of
as just one Lotus product.


Some Connections deployment tips

• Don’t assume you need to deploy (or launch) all Connections features immediately.
If finding people is your main concern, install all the features but only enable
Profiles. Then bring the other features on-stream later
• Pre-load as many of the Profile fields as possible, including photos & add custom
fields to suit your organisational need. Do this BEFORE loading pilot/production
users
• Integrate Connections data into your other applications/environments ASAP -
particularly Notes and Sametime
• ‘Educate’ your users - don’t just ‘train’ them in how to use the Connections tools.
Instead, inform them why social software can help, how to use the features to
improve the organisation’s information sharing. Explain tagging and why that’s
important
• Give the users some tasks/projects that must be completed in Connections
(especially Activities) to get them involved
• Reward those that embrace the technology best and evangelise to others in the
organisation


What will be the hurdles?

• Driving Adoption

• WebSphere/RDBMS/MQ skills

• Cost & ROI Justiﬁcation


Adoption in the Enterprise

• Not a new problem (ref. Lotus Notes, circa 1990)

• Today - Viral Effort - Consumer-driven

• Beneﬁts include:

• Greater agility

• Accelerates development cycles

• Sales team enablement

• Enabling collaborative business processes

• Human to human sharing of knowledge

• “Before implementing a community platform, over 3% of a company's daily
internet trafﬁc was to sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace”

Reported at the Office2.0 conference (Sept 2008)


Summary

• Lotus Connections software helps to 'ﬂatten the grid' and encourage
participation from all directions

• Helps the best ideas emerge

• Improves transparency

• Drives innovation

• Companies of all shapes and sizes are deriving real business beneﬁt from
Lotus Connections today!

• Lotus Connections 2.5 is coming soon (early 3Q09) - with massive
enhancements

• Social software is here to stay!


Thank You!

Stuart McIntyre
Collaboration Matters Limited

stuart@collaborationmatters.com
http://collaborationmatters.com
08450 728628
Twitter: stuartmcintyre

http://lotusconnectionsblog.com
http://quickrblog.com
http://lotussymphonyblog.com
http://lotusliveblog.com
http://lotusphereblog.com

http://planetlotus.org
http://synch.rono.us


Lotus Connections 2.0 - A Deployment Portfolio

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