Skip to main content

Getting your Head around the IBM Connections ID

We had a very useful meeting with IBM last week and a lot came out of it. A lot of things from that meeting will probably hit this blog in one form or another.  One rather interesting topic for us was "users". 

Our organisation uses a "Membership structure", meaning that while the organisation itself only has a small number of "core users", we have an enormous number of "extended users" (members) who don't work directly for us but connect on a number of issues and participate in a number of groups on a very regular basis. 

It sounds like an unusual organisational structure but once you get your head around the model, you'll find that it's not only fairly common but that it's becoming more common for companies to work this way.

...and it's a great fit for IBM Connections**

**Note that when I talk about IBM Connections, I'm talking about their Connections.Cloud product, why would I talk about anything else?


Verse Users and Contacts 
One of the first things we noticed when we moved some of our test users up to verse was the absence of many of our contacts.

In IBM Notes/Domino we use two address books, one for actual employees and the other for members of other organisations. It's kind of like a central CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.  Moving up to Verse only took our staff members lists.

The problem with that is simply that we can't lookup their details easily "on the road" because they're no longer in our cloud-based "traveler". Also, we can't email them by name from verse, and we can't easily schedule meetings. It's a big problem for us. 

There's apparently a way to fix this, it's something to do with the extended directory catalog but we're still working on it so I don't have any magic solutions there.

We've also discovered that in a half-migrated hybrid setup, non-verse (Notes) users can't see new entries in the personal calendars for Verse users. We're not sure if that's a problem with our specific setup or a general problem. 

Back to users... what was interesting from IBM was the idea that verse and connections aren't using the same "address book". For those of us coming from a Notes/Domino background, this is rather unusual.


IBM Connections Users
Unlike Verse, there are no simple "contacts" in connections, everyone is a "user" in some form. They're either full users or "guests" of full users. 

What's interesting though is that connections users are more or less unique (by email address). That's to say that an email address can only be used once in connections. A connections user logs in with their email address and a password.

The account is set up when they first use connections regardless of whether it is a guest account or a paid corporate account. If a person starts  as a guest of one company and their own company later adopts connections, the password remains the same, the account is simply "upgraded" thus preserving all of their existing "connections".

It's clever and clearly IBM is banking on the features of connections "selling" the service to their "guests"; which it largely does.

There's still one problematic area. The world of Connections US and Connections Asia-Pacific seem to be disconnected. The login is shared, so you can't add a US person to the Japanese data centre because the email address has already been used but equally, you can't engage people from different data centres in the same communities.

In a global economy, this is a big problem but IBM is working on it, so hopefully it will get some priority.

The other problems from my point of view are that connections is very flat, it lacks hierarchy (nested groups). A very useful Notes feature. It also seems to lack a bit of granularity (something provided by two more great Notes/Domino features; [Roles] and Readers/Authors fields). Add something like that and there's no compelling reason to stay on Domino any more.

In the meantime, thanks to the open API in connections, there's a new breed of "Domino" app moving in to bridge those gaps between Notes and Connections.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher