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Thoughts from Lotusphere 2012: IBM Connections 4 (“Next”)

January 23rd, 2012

At the Lotusphere 2012 Opening General Session (OGS) and throughout the conference IBM showed the next version of IBM Connections (to be called IBM Connections 4.0?). My first impression of the next release of IBM Connections is that it looks really, really great! Among many things it features exciting new elements such as activity streams, social mail and embedded apps (using open standards such as Activity Streams and OpenSocial gadgets).

Embedded apps for activity streams can be created using e.g. XPages. An embedded app makes it possible for the user to take action directly from the invidual post in the activity stream (without leaving IBM Connections).

The integrated mail and calendar of IBM Connections (social mail) will support Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange as backend mail servers. This is an interesting move  that makes the underlying mail server in use irrelevant to the IBM Connections deployment.

IBM Connections 4 also includes community metrics (to track e.g. adoption rates), optional realtime group video chat using a plugin from Polycom, ECM library integration and realtime co-editing of documents, presentations and spreadsheets using IBM Docs (IBM Docs is currently in beta on IBM Greenhouse).

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5 Responses to “Thoughts from Lotusphere 2012: IBM Connections 4 (“Next”)”

  1. Thoughts from Lotusphere 2012: Lotus Notes Social Edition | Per Henrik Lausten Says:
    January 23rd, 2012 at 14:27

    [...] Per Henrik Lausten A blog on Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, XPages and more « Thoughts from Lotusphere 2012: IBM Connections 4 (“Next”) [...]

  2. Patrick Kwinten Says:
    January 24th, 2012 at 15:49

    I want XPages running on the Connections server, would be interesting application development platform !

  3. IBM ermöglicht das Social Business – Ein Überblick über die Neuerungen in Connections Next » Connections, Activity, Social, E-Mail, Informationen, Punkt » Human Network Competence Says:
    January 26th, 2012 at 02:17

    [...] verschiedenen Blogbeiträge von Peter Schütt (Beitrag), Barb Mosher (Beitrag) und Henrik Lausten (Beitrag) zusammen, hat IBM mit Connections Next in der Version 4.0 die Social Software Suite für [...]

  4. Chris Stevenson Says:
    February 2nd, 2012 at 23:10

    Any word on the targeted release date?

  5. Per Henrik Lausten Says:
    February 3rd, 2012 at 14:48

    Hi Chris, I have not heard of a release date. I have read that IBM hopefully will ship a beta version of IBM Connections 4 within the first half of 2012.