What’s new at a glance

IBM Connections 3 is social software designed to meet the needs of business. It empowers business professionals to be more innovative and productive by helping them build networks of subject matter experts. It facilitates the creation of vibrant communities of employees, partners, and customers where creative ideas can be exchanged to help foster increased business growth.

IBM Connections can help teams accomplish their business objectives whether they are located locally or distributed geographically.

Moderation

There are now capabilities in blogs, forums, and files to review content before it’s published and to approve, reject, or delete as appropriate.

Additionally, moderation allows the review and management of content that users flag as inappropriate.

These capabilities help community owners realize the benefits of active and vibrant community participation, while having the confidence of being able to moderate the content that appears in the community.

Ideation blog

A new template is now available for each community to generate ideas, gather feedback, and come to consensus on the best ideas. This simplifies sharing of ideas in a community, voting on them, and moving the best ones forward as projects.

Media Gallery widget

Community members can upload and share photos and videos with the rest of the community using the new Media Gallery widget.

Rich media formats supported by the widget provide the flexibility to enable rich forms of collaboration and expertise sharing to enhance creativity and improve engagement across the community.

You can integrate content libraries with IBM Connections communities to allow community members to manage documents and work with folders stored in enterprise content management (ECM) systems, IBM FileNet® Content Manager and IBM Content Manager, from within IBM Connections.

New widgets recommend people with whom you may want to connect and content that may be relevant to you.

The widgets display what you have in common with recommended people, such as their community membership, and the social path that links you to them:

• Do You Know widget: Recommends people for you to add to your network based on your existing connections, tags, organizational relationships, and actions that you have taken.

• Things in Common widget: Helps you identify what you have in common with a person, such as a list of the communities that you and the profile owner both belong to or a list of the tags that you both use.

• Who Connects Us widget: Shows the social path that links you to a person.

Discovering relevant content

A new Recommendations widget suggests content from different applications that may interest you. You can use these recommendations to expand your network and to find content that is relevant to you.

Staying informed of updates

New filtering options make it easier for you to keep up with the latest updates.

The My To-Do List widget now uses a list format, so it is easy to scan your to-do items and prioritize them as needed.

Expanding and connecting with your professional network

The new Do You Know, Things In Common, and Who Connects Us widgets help you discover what links you to others in your organization. These new widgets can help you determine if you want to connect with people to expand your social network.

The new Directory page simplifies searching your company's directory to find the people and expertise that you need.

A new My Network page ensures that your network contacts are just a click away.

Navigating to the profile information you need

The My Profile page user experience has been enhanced making it easier and faster for you to navigate between the different areas of your profile, and it is easier to navigate directly to any profiles page.

Keeping profile status current

When individuals leave an organization, an administrator can set their status to inactive. When you view the profile of an inactive user, the profile owner is flagged inactive, and his photo is not shown.

Locating experts

It is easier and faster to access profile information for an individual, and it is now simpler to search your organization's directory and access your network contacts.

Discovering, following, and contributing to communities

A Recommendations widget suggests communities for you to join based on your existing community membership, network connections, and tags.

You can now follow communities that interest you to get the latest updates from those communities in the home page news feed.

New filtering options are available on the My Communities page, so you can display communities that you own, are a member of, or follow.

A new Files widget makes it easy to upload and share files with your communities.

Customizing a community

Communities can have sub-communities to bring added attention and focus to a topic or subject.

When creating an activity for a community, you can add a subset of members to the activity and choose the role that those members will have. This can help to focus your efforts on projects.

When you apply a theme to a community, the theme is now also applied to the community blog, wiki, and forums.

Community owners can add multiple forums to a community and can perform additional tasks, such as marking forum topics as questions.

Encouraging community growth

Community owners can invite people to join their community, and members of public communities can send invitations to people who they think might be interested in joining.

Navigating to and following files

The new Follow feature notifies you automatically when a file or folder you select is updated.

The new Thumbtack feature lets you select your favorite files and folders so that they are easier to find.

Contributing, organizing, and managing files

Files can be collected into folders to match your projects or areas of interest. You can add files to folders by dragging and dropping them onto a folder.

You can move files to a trash view where they are not visible to others; files in the trash are not permanently deleted until you choose to empty the trash view.

You can share personal files with a community.

A new editor makes it easier to author blog entries and to enhance them with pictures and videos.

Auto-save saves your in-progress work and reminds you when you have unsaved work so you can resume editing.

Creating activities for use by a community

You can add a community to an activity either while creating the activity or afterward. You can restrict access for a community activity to a subset of community members.

Locating an activity

You can now search the tag cloud for a specific tag and multiple tags.

The bookmarks service allows you to save, organize, and share bookmarks as well as discover bookmarks that have been qualified by others.

The enhanced bookmark form makes it easier to tag a bookmark and add it to another application.

Updated notification gives you more options for notifying other users about a broken link.

Customizing a wiki

In IBM Connections 3, moving pages is even easier. You can reorder pages by dragging and dropping them.

You can paste content from other sources more easily with the improvements in the rich text editor.

Presence and awareness of IBM Sametime has been added into wikis providing real-time access to needed expertise.

Locating the wiki you need

You can find a wiki by selecting Go to Wiki in the search menu and typing the title. You can also search for all public wikis and wikis you are a member of by selecting All Wikis in the search menu.

In My Wikis, a new navigation box provides a simple way to see different views of wikis. For example, you can click I'm an Owner to see wikis to which you have owner access.

The My Wikis view now has a tag cloud.

Tracking changes

The index of each wiki now makes it easy to find the pages that have been edited by a particular person.

A new wiki membership view makes it easy to control membership and manage access and includes a new layout displaying role information and filters.

Forums provide a convenient way to create an on-line discussion where people can ask questions, share their experiences, and discuss topics of common interest. Participating in a forum allows you to benefit from the expertise of other people.

The new Public Forums page displays all the public forums in your organization so that people can find those that may be of interest to them. Forums can be used as a stand-alone application or integrated within a community.

IBM Connections 3 expands the number of applications accessible from a mobile browser. Support for mobile browser access has been added to the IBM Connections home page, bookmarks, communities, forums, files, and wikis. Profiles, activities, and blogs continue to be supported for mobile browser access.

Here are examples of the capabilities provided:

• Update your status.

• Add new people to your network.

• Share a file.

• Log into a community to post information.

• Add a bookmark.

In particular, the list of supported mobile devices has been expanded to include the Apple iPad and devices running the Android 2.x operating system.

A new API enables the tracking of all data changes across IBM Connections. This API can be used by software developers and application providers to provide compliance and auditability solutions that integrate with IBM Connections.

With Connections 3, a new API has been added to enhance existing capabilities for blogs.