Category: Projects

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!

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.

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.

ScreenShot_ConnectionsManager_CommunitySettings

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

Slides and Reality – Update on an IBM Connections Project

Last week a tweet from my fellow IBM Champion Roberto Mazzoni reminded me that until now I never published our session slides from this years’ Engage in Eindhoven. Our presentation was all around the IBM Connections rollout and the journey of the University of Zurich. The story starts with a daring let’s try this “social stuff” and is now a full production environment with 12’oo0 people working at the University (no students yet). Often customers are quite keen to share a success-story; but not all are willing to share also the lessons learned or talk freely about failures during the implementation phase.

As I personally think that there is more to learn from the latter, I can only recommend our presentation for any organization that is planning or ready to go live with IBM Connections or a collaboration platform in general.

Perfectly in synch with the slides, last week the targeted 12’000 users have now access and can use the system. Congratulations and thank you Roberto for sharing your success-story and I am crossing my fingers for the next steps to come. Discussions and requests to open up the environment for the students were heard, which means efforts on the infrastructure side as well as efforts regarding the administrative side.