Sandra Bühler – Sandra's Blog

Engage: Here we come

Engage is only a few days away, and it’s high time to prepare and rehearse our session. This year I have the pleasure to talk together with Jörg Rafflenbeul from Heitkamp & Thumann. We will share how we did split their Connections environment in two parts to match the management decision of a spin-off. The break-up project last autumn was the successful starting point of our business collaboration and we will share the insights and the learnings.

This years’ Engage will take part in Arnhem (Netherlands) at the Burgers’ Zoo March 3rd/4th, 2020 and it is for sure worth your time. Already 400 people have registered and only a few seats are left, so hurry to register, if you haven’t already.
https://engage.ug/engage2.nsf/Pages/attend2020

Our session will be on Wednesday, March 4th, 2020 from 09-10 am at the Mount Kenia Lodge
https://engage.ug/engage2.nsf/Pages/session2020

I am looking forward to see a lot of familiar faces and to meet new ones.

Slides of just another HCL Connections Use Case

Please find my slides from the previous Snoug in Zurich (November 2019). As a customer case is involved and insights of the project are shared and documented I needed to make sure that everything in the presentation is approved by the customer and I do have the green light to publish everything. So all good, and now public!

Belsoft Collaboration Success Story: Mit Connections Gutes tun from Belsoft

The slides are in German as I used them both for DNUG in summer and in an updated version also for Snoug. It is the story of how and why the Red Cross Section of the State of Zurich has chosen HCL Connections over other collaboration solutions in the market (like Sharepoint or also Slack). Hint: The full set of functions, the easy search over all content a user has access to, the mobile app and the guest model won the case.

The customer wanted to make sure that the volunteers they support and organize with Connections were happy with the new tool and could get fast to the information they needed in order to help people in need. For that the Red Cross (Zurich) started with a smaller group of internal people and volunteers to make sure, that Connections could fulfil the promises. Therefore you’ll find the results of the survey the customer did, just before they decided to go live with Connections. (Pages 20-23).

After a full year of using Connections, the project leader and IT Manager is truly happy with the decision that had been taken and he is genuinely surprised about the little support that is needed from their side, how the different Communities organize themselves, are active and used every day.

Enhancement Requests for Domino and Connections – A Preliminary Report

About a year ago IBM Offering Management launched their tracking portal for new ideas and enhancements requests around IBM Domino and IBM Connections. On both sites you can add more ideas and comment and upvote on existing ideas. There’s an easy overview of what is under consideration or what had been delivered.

https://domino.ideas.aha.io/

https://connections.ideas.aha.io/

Both platforms hold a huge amount of great ideas. For many surprisingly IBM Connections has much more ideas stored in the platform than Domino. Once an idea is available, everyone can vote up. The originator of the idea and all who voted up do receive status updates when an idea gets promoted.

While the amount of ideas under consideration is much bigger than the planned or delivered ideas, recently the interactions distinctly picked up and more and more ideas got an update and were worked on by IBM.

Call to action for all customers and business partners: Use the platform, fill in new ideas and vote or comment on existing ones, help making better the solutions we use and love.

Last but not least: A huge thanks to the offering managers who are working on it and report back to use through the system.

Our slides from Engage

The last two days at Engage were very busy and the event went very well. Theo and Hilde set once more the bar of how events should be run and were the perfect hosts. The two days were filled with sessions, roundtables and meetings around the IBM ICS stack as well as a analytics related track.

Here are the slides from the session I held together with Roberto Mazzoni from the University of Zurich regarding the IBM Connections environment that is now also used from the students.

IBM Connections ready for students at University of Zurich from Belsoft

I enjoyed the days in Rotterdam, it was great to meet so many great people from all over the world. Save trip home everyone!

Out of my comfort zone

I had a very busy year so far. We started with different new projects, mostly IBM Connections related, but we also worked on development projects and did consulting around security topics. A very interesting and inspiring IBM Think event followed in March. Just after being back from Las Vegas we organized our annual customer event and presented the good news about #Domino2025 to a very eager audience. Should anyone have missed the great news, here are the most recent slides from IBM and HCL as presented during #SocialConnections in Philadelphia.

IBM Domino 10: A new chapter begins from LetsConnect

So far so good and nothing out of the ordinary, right? But after months or years doing our business like it was “business as usual” we wanted to step outside our comfort zone and approached totally new customers (prospects) and introduced them to the collaboration solutions and offerings from IBM.

Talking to new companies and contacts, that we’ve had no ties nor common ground with, was totally outside my comfort zone and I felt unsure and somehow out of place. But, it was worth it! The experience was totally eye-opening.

The eye-opener was that those Swiss companies (not small ones) from different industries never had heard of IBM Connections and were not aware that IBM even had a solution that could help fulfill their business needs around collaboration sites and know-how sharing. To look at solutions from IBM never crossed their minds.

Those customers never assumed they had a choice besides the offering from Microsoft. So after very busy weeks and a lot of conversations with different companies I can confirm there is a huge opportunity to talk to new faces and going outside the comfort zone.

In only a few days, I will be at Engage in Rotterdam and will have a session with Roberto Mazzoni from the University of Zurich. We will talk about how the University works with IBM Connections and made the solution popular amongst students as well. I will also share my insights from outside my comfort zone and what I’ve learned over the last few weeks.

Engage in Antwerp – What I’m up to

I’m on my way to Antwerp in Belgium. The next two days an impressive crowd of over 400 attendees will gather around the Elisabeth Center in Antwerp for over 60 sessions in 5 tracks. Again, Theo Heselmans organized an event that will amaze us and bring together IBMers, business partners and customers all interested in solutions, products and projects of the IBM Collaboration stack. Thank you Theo, for all your hard work, I’m sure the event will go smoothly due to your organizational skills and will be a huge success. As always, you’ll be the perfect host!

Mostly I will attend presentations and will learn new stuff, interact with other attendees and talk about projects, issues, roadmaps, the past we all share and the future that lays ahead.

On Tuesday, May 9th, I am going to be co-presenting together with Roberto Mazzoni from the University of Zurich in the very last slot, just before the closing session. I hope there will still be a lot of people around – you will hear about how the University is going forward with their collaboration projects and how 40’000 users do interact and communicate.

To all attendees new in the crowd or a bit shy, even if many of us have known each other for a long time and are friends, we still are eager to get to know new faces as well. Don’t be shy, introduce yourself and be sure to be in the middle of friendly people from all over the world!

A glimpse back to a Pink Wednesday

Sitting at the airport in San Francisco to head home, I finally found some time to write the blogpost I wanted to write since Wednesday. Wednesday was the busiest day for me at IBM Connect and I attended session after session and had a broad grin on my face by the end of the day. The sessions that I attended were around IBM Connections and the colour pink was not only a eye catcher on the podium, but is nothing less than the future of IBM Connections.

As both Jason Gary and Baan Slavens mentioned several times, Pink is a journey and this journey just started, I was nevertheless amazed that a first “Pink” part will already be delivered with IBM Connections 6 that is more or less just around the corner. Orient Me (the new homepage) is the first pink infused part that will be introduced to Connections with the next (On Prem) version and will help the users to get a much better overview of the content and will be a big step regarding ease of use.

What got me really excited is the technical concept of “Pink” and the fact that there will be only one code stream in the future and it’s absolutely up to the customers where they want to run IBM Connections. It will run on premises, in the IBM cloud or also as a hybrid setup (like profiles need to be in the own data center, blogs can run in the cloud). What that means is that on-premises customer do not need to wait for a version to be published after a few months that the functions were introduced to the cloud environment. All customers can immediately benefit from the new stuff.

During technical and design sessions we learned that the now existing middleware for IBM Connections will be totally dismissed. So no more IBM Websphere, DB2 or Cognos. Instead all admins should be ready and happy to learn new things like Docker or React.js

The connections pink future is fueled with Watson (AI) capabilities and the development team in charge confirmed that this will also work on-premises. But not only the technical message was well received, the Business Partners and customers should be happy that Jason Gary don’t want to develop “Pink” for us, but with us. And one more thing that will make the developers happy: “will we ship without API’s? “without API’s we will not ship it”.

Regarding the header picture featuring Jason Gary and Baan Slavens: I’ve asked for permission to make it public and permission was granted. Thank you Baan 😉

What we were up to the last few weeks – Let me introduce the “Community Manager for IBM Connections” toolset

This summer we were quite busy working at the Belsoft Collaboration headquarters and I was much less in the mountain home office than I had wished. But…

A positive side effect of working during summer is that our developers were able to finalize a tool set for IBM Connections that we were using already to support our customers during IBM Connections projects. I’d like to introduce you to our Community Manager for IBM Connections toolset that will help your organization when running IBM Connections and will make the adoption process easier for sure.

We learned during our projects that many customer are looking for a solution that ensure that all or a certain subset of users are members (and are following) certain communities that are used for official communication means within an organization. With our easy to use tool you can ensure that. Authorized community managers have an overview of the settings and the communities that are managed.

The Community Manager toolset is an add-on to IBM Connections and runs on top of the existing IBM Websphere stack.

Not all functionality that we will add in the future is already integrated in the toolset, but some very handy features are already there and ready to install and use. Let me know if we can help you to make better use of your IBM Connections environment and get in contact. More insights, news and details will follow within the next few days.

Huge thanks goes to Urs Meli and Frédéric Dehédin, the brains behind the toolset

Blogpost of Urs Meli