Today is a special day for lots of reasons, not least because it’s the last time for a very long time that we’ll see a perfectly repeating date: 12/12/12.

It’s also No Email Day – a day when us social types use social networks, twitter and all other “social” communication methods to show that email is less useful these days for collaborating with our colleagues than other media available to us now.

With this in mind, I have prepared the attached which you might want to use for your desktop background or something similar. Enjoy.

Recent Blog Posts

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The (Social) Network Is Your Company Fri, May 17th 2013 3:13p Alan Hamilton John Gage, the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems coined the now famous phrase: “The Network is the Computer” which became a prominent feature on the Sun Microsystems’ logo and motto. More than that it became part of their philosophy before the large scale adoption of the internet. They realised that the combined power of computers, interconnected, is the real computer – able to carry out more complex tasks than would otherwise be possible by the boxes we sit in front of today. That s [read] Keywords: connections ibm development exchange exchange facebook network networking oracle server wiki

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How I saved eight minutes today by doing nothing Mon, Apr 29th 2013 3:16p Alan Hamilton This is a short example of something that landed in my inbox today which, I confess, I was so impressed with I just had to share it. In the nearly twenty years I have been working with Notes I have become accustomed to receiving emails with DocLinks, and more recently URLs to databases or other applications which a user wants me to interact with. A DocLink, for the uninitiated, is basically like a URL but specifically for a Notes document in a database somewhere. This predates URLs by about [read] Keywords: connections ibm lotus notes application applications database email

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Turning Blue Fri, Mar 15th 2013 12:11p Alan Hamilton I am pleased to announce that from Monday 18th March I will have joined IBM to further my career in Social Business. I am joining the world-wide ICS SWAT/Tiger team as a Social Business Consultant, focused on the UK, Ireland and Nordics. I am really looking forward to some new challenges and perspectives having spent nearly 20 years in the IBM Business Partner community, so I hope you continue to follow my blog. [read] Keywords: ibm community swat

250

Socialize your Public Folders with Notes 9.0 Social Edition and IBM Connections Activities Tue, Mar 12th 2013 6:12a Alan Hamilton To mark the launch of IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition I wanted to show how you can liberate yourself from the tyranny of Exchange Public Folders whilst making the process of sharing information and working together on tasks a truly SOCIAL process. In my last blog post I demonstrated how to use Activities in IBM Connections to restructure a project and manage the process. In this post I want to show how the System of Engagement – i.e. engaging people in managing the project and its tasks, c [read] Keywords: connections ibm lotus notes email enterprise exchange exchange integration

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Using Activities to Restructure and Manage a Project Mon, Mar 11th 2013 9:12a Alan Hamilton Earlier today I was preparing a project for handover to a colleague. Although we have a documented process we follow for the work, it is in the form of a Word document and can be difficult to track which steps you’ve completed and which are still to be done. So that my colleague and his manager can work through the steps to be performed in a set order I went about using one of my favourite applications within IBM Connections – Activities. Activities is like a simple to-do list manager wh [read] Keywords: connections ibm notes rich text sametime applications community email server wiki

298

Integrate LibreOffice with IBM SmartCloud and IBM Connections Sat, Mar 9th 2013 8:13a Alan Hamilton In a previous blog post I expounded the virtues of using the IBM Connections Desktop Plugin for Windows to make working with IBM SmartCloud for Social Business and also your own IBM Connections environment more seamless. In this post I am going to describe how to use a popular alternative to OpenOffice, LibreOffice, to access the same services from any platform using IBM’s CMIS integration services. Content Management Interoperability Services is a standard used amongst enterprise conte [read] Keywords: connections ibm ldd lotus desktop enterprise integration mobile openoffice password server wiki

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How can we create Predictive Knowledge? Fri, Feb 22nd 2013 3:10p Alan Hamilton Lew Platt, HP. “If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.” Much is discussed these days about Big Data and the role of Predictive Analytics to help create better business decisions and provide information from data. How would it be, however if we could apply Predictive Analytics to knowledge? What I am getting at here is the role that Predictive Analytics can play in recommending information to you, suggesting next steps for you in a business process, co [read] Keywords: connections ibm application database email linking networking server wiki

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Social File Sharing with IBM Connections Desktop Plugin Tue, Feb 12th 2013 2:10p Alan Hamilton An often overlooked aspect of the IBM Connections social business platform is its ability to integrate itself with many different parts of the working environment. If you’re a Lotus Notes user you may be aware that there is an Activities sidebar. Did you know, though, that from the Greenhouse catalog you can also install the Files and Status updates sidebar to make dragging and dropping files in and out of emails much easier? Even if you’re not a Lotus Notes user, you still have [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm lotus notes application desktop microsoft password properties server

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Color-coding diary appointments is not just for Outlook any more Wed, Feb 6th 2013 2:10p Alan Hamilton In a recent migration from Exchange to Domino one of our customers complained that they thought Outlook was a much better tool because – and this was apparently the only reason – they could color-code diary appointments depending on the category they chose for the appointment. Well, the good news is that IBM Notes Social Edition does that too!, behold: You can set up the colors for the categories in a new tab in the Preferences, right next to the color-coding of emails you’ve [read] Keywords: domino ibm ldd lotus notes exchange exchange outlook

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Microsoft: Late to the Party Again Mon, Feb 4th 2013 2:11p Alan Hamilton Microsoft recently published a white paper, “The new world of social collaboration” where they set out their vision for “cultural, technological, business and industry trends that are driving social collaboration in the enterprise” I invite you to have a read of it, if only for two reasons: To recognize the same facts and phenomena which IBM and others have been evangelizing about for a very long time; For the quote “Today, Yammer and SharePoint are connected throu [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm enterprise integration microsoft sharepoint