March 11, 2012

Creating a Social Construction Project

In my last-but-one posting, The Social Construction Project, I promised to provide a worked example of how to socialise a construction project extranet to the benefit of those involved. So, here goes:

I am going to use IBM Connections as my example for customisation, but I am sure you could adapt these ideas for any social business solution.

In the Model 1 diagram above I show that the main areas concerning a construction project can quite easily be implemented in Connections:

Change Management is probably one of the most complex but can easily be standardised into the main workflows the project needs based on common definitions agreed by the industry itself.
Drawings fits easily into the Files area. Uploads, downloads and all that good stuff are handled easily by Files.
Standard work procedures in place in the project, such as health-and-safety details, contractor inductions, etc would be placed in the Wiki.
The Site Diary, a record of what has happened on the site can easily be implemented using a Blog.
The two distinct groups I discussed in my earlier post, the design team and the contractors would be managed through communities. As the main contractor you’d be a member of both communities. Anyone else, often including the client, would only be a member of one of the communities as well as all the “public” information.

For a much larger project, such as one with multiple sites or very complex requirements like multiple buildings, a bigger model is needed. Importantly, however, many organisations who would really benefit from a social business project management tool do lots of small jobs. Implementing Model 1 would quickly become unmanageable for their requirements, so I propose for these situations, Model 2:

Key to deployment of this kind of structure is the ability to template a community so that it appears each time with the same structure, of course!

Finally for an extremely large construction project, like the stadium in London for an upcoming sports event, we might consider using an entire instance of IBM Connections to host the system:

Without turning this into a shameless sales drive for IBM Connections, its worth considering Model 3 for a moment and the implications for the IT infrastructure you would deploy.

Running a project like the Olympic Stadium generates enormous amounts of data. Leaving out the drawings, can you imagine the amount of documentation which would be associated with such a project? Getting some proper advice from who is going to run a social solution like this is vital to ensure that it operates trouble-free throughout the life of the project. IBM Connections runs on IBM WebSphere and as such can be scaled horizontally and vertically – in some situations where individual applications (such as Activities) are hosted and clustered on individual servers. In this way the IBM big-iron approach allows you to be confident your system won’t let you down. My point here, to quote Steven Covey, is “Start with the end in mind”. Connections lets you scale up so, think about it!

So what might this look like in IBM Connections? Well, first off the Community can be set up as follows:

Change Management, the management of changes on the job, is one of the most tricky parts for any computer system to handle. It’s easy enough to prepare a system which provides workflow, but to put the ability to tweak that workflow into the hands of the end users whilst maintaining oversight and control is more difficult, especially for systems which set out to be glorified web based file systems. Thankfully, as you’re probably expecting by now, we have an excellent platform in the shape of Connections’ Activities. I have waxed on about Activities before, but here’s my flowchart with swimlanes to show how it would be set up:

In the screenshot below, I show a particular change request, SI-0019-20, Removal of Retaining Wall, which started life as a Request for Information. This is automatically linked (using the Social Business Toolkit) to the new Site Instruction which is where the main contractor tells someone on site to do something.

Through the use of Activity Templates Site Instructions, Requests for Information and all the other types of change processes can easily be handled.

One other quick point to make – criticism of online systems for construction often centre around the need to be able to record who received drawings. In the old paper world a Transmittal Sheet would be used as a kind of manifest for the drawings being sent to the recipient.

This can easily be achieved using Activities again, providing a template for the transmittal and attaching to the activity bookmarks to the drawing files which the recipient is to get. IBM Connections keeps track of who downloaded the files so you also have a record to prove someone has the information they are supposed to have.

Summary

I hope from this brief tour of building a Social Construction Project you can see that even the most complex requirements can be addressed in a system such as IBM Connections. The benefits of sharing, networking and discovering I discussed in the Social Construction Project blog entry are real and I hope that this article has given you some inspiration to give it a try.

March 6, 2012

Looks like there’s a problem with Lotus Notes and OS X Mountain Lion…

(Puma concolor) aka: Mountain Lion, Puma — Image via Wikipedia

I kept wondering where the Apple Notes application had vanished when playing with the Developer Preview version of Apple Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

I realised it wasn’t there because I had Lotus Notes installed. Both have an application icon with the name “Notes”.

If Notes is installed and you upgrade, you lose the Apple Notes application. If you install Lotus Notes after Mountain Lion, the install fails.

I am sure someone in IBM knows this….but just in case!

March 5, 2012

The Social Construction Project

I must confess that when I first heard about CEMEX’s successful use of IBM Connections I was amazed at how an apparently very manual, practical and non-IT-oriented organisation had become a social business:

It got me thinking about how I might apply a social business environment to other industries and I realised that the construction industry is an ideal place to deploy social business.

The Anatomy of a Construction Project

A construction project – building a new home, office block, shopping mall, or whatever, is all about people. In most cases the people work in many different organisations and are appointed either by the client (the organisation who has commissioned the building) or the contractor (the organisation charged with physically building it).

As well as the client and contractor there will likely be the following other companies to a greater or lesser extent:

Architect
Quantity Surveyor
Mechanical Engineer
Electrical Engineer
Planning Supervisor

The contractor, whose job it is to build the thing will appoint sub-contractors who are specialists in their areas, e.g.

Electrician
A/C Engineers
Structural Steelwork
Plumbing
Groundworks
… and so on

What I want you to understand from this is that there are lots of different companies involved. Each company of course has multiple people involved and hence you immediately have a social network formed where people need to meet, understand their position and hear about what they’re doing.

The construction industry is typically quite conservative when it comes to working practices. This is partly because it is very litigious (often a company’s only route to making a profit on a project is through litigation). Times have changed, however, and nowadays project extranets are virtually mandated on projects of any size.

Information Overload

Construction is all about instructions. Everyone covers themselves with an instruction to do this, or othat, and failure to do so, or to act in time is often the basis of litigation. Therefore in the bad old days, a construction project would produce literally tons of paper. As time moved on this moved to fax and then email. Many hundreds of gigabytes of emails, drawings, documents and other information are produced on a construction project of any size.

Thus the project extranet was born. Instead of bombarding everyone with all this data and giving each company the same headache about receipt and retention of information organisations such as 4Projects, BIW and others have sprung up to provide a customised centralised location for information to be stored and notifications sent.

Although these systems achieve their aim by cutting down the IT hurdle involved in managing a construction project, they don’t offer the benefits an in-house project team deploying a social intranet experience.

Social Construction

So why would a construction project want to be run in a social manner? A project needs the following:

A place to store and manage controlled documents like drawings, specifications and reports;
A way of updating others on changes to files and other important information;
A project directory so that everyone knows each other’s responsibilities;
A management and workflow engine to provide a standard approach to managing changes and which provides industry-standard templates to achieve these changes;
A way of managing revisions to documents and being able to back-track through previous revisions;
Security and auditability of all changes in the system;

Using a Social Business approach to these requirements allows:

A great reduction in irrelevant information flooding into users mailboxes (remember that many construction professionals work on several projects at a time and hence can receive several hundred notification emails a day);
The necessary management and control structures to deliver industry standard processes which as subject to audit;
Cross-system tagging and discovery of information which previously was not possible through traditional systems;
The opportunity to simplify the reporting structure and information update paradigm so that although the same rigour of reporting is put in place, it is done so less formally (I will explain in a minute).
The basic utility functions of file sharing and information dissemination are covered through Files and Wikis.
Knowing who to contact is addressed through Profiles.
Fine-grained control of project activities, completion and progressing is delivered using Activities.
Standard Operating Procedures, Policies and other standard documentation is covered and controlled using Wikis.
Micro-blogging by each participant can be used as a way of updating others on the status of their part of the project, such as “Drawing 193783 – Second Floor Revision A drawing posted to the General Arrangements Folder”.

Working Socially in Construction

Blogging

Blogging might be scoffed at as simply a way for the idle to promote themselves (ahem!). In a construction context, blogging can be a system of record where each organisation reports formally on the work they have done, advises others of issues arising and generally uses it to communicate.

I advocate that blogging would allow the individual organisations to make the formal reports they need, provides the security to prevent later tampering with the reports and also provides the longevity of data storage which is needed to aid referencing in the future.

Micro-Blogging

Instead of endlessly producing memos of updates on the status of work, construction projects can use micro-blogging (similar to Twitter) to publish what’s going on. Those involved can subscribe to the feeds from different players in the system.

File Management

Centrally storing files and providing a mechanism for revision is a given in any viable project extranet. Any social business solution worth its salt provides this functionality. By tagging the files (with the same bank of tags which are used throughout the system) not only can the hierarchy of files and folders which the industry is used to be maintained, but cross-functional meta data can also be provided.

For example, any project would likely structure its files according to the building, the structure, then perhaps the package of work the drawings represent. This would still be the same. However, by using tags to further describe the content of the drawing it becomes possible to locate the information you need in future alongside other explicit knowledge in other areas of the system. For example, on an electrical drawing you might tag the file air conitioning, data outlets, electrical sockets. Later, blog entries, wikis, status updates and other content similarly tagged can then be grouped with what might otherwise seem to be an irrelevant file.

The ability for not only the owner of the file but in fact any user to tag the file means that the tacit knowledge the users of the system have can be applied. Let’s say I open the drawing and find that it also includes information on the lighting. I tag the file with ighting and have contributed to the body of knowledge without affecting the original data.

Process Management

Most project extranets provide inflexible approaches to managing processes. Some construction projects can be complex and require many different pieces of information to be recorded as well as actions to be taken.

Using a social system which has something like IBM Connections’ Activities framework (where rich templates of process can be defined and reused over and over) provides a mechanism to define, refine and run change management, information review and general management processes for the project.

Communities

Where information needs to be gathered into logical groups, communities can be formed. These allow files, wikis, blogs, activities and all sorts of other information to be brought together under one logical group.

This allows the like-minded to gather and discuss, share and contribute in ways which is not currently possible using traditional extranets.

Tuning Out Socially

As I alluded at the start of this article, there is a defined structure to a construction project. The amount of information generated can easily overwhelm anyone. Using communities and activity streams to group and connect with the relevant people involved in the project allows everyone to stay in control of the stuff that is important to their job.

A Social Construction Project provides these social features with the same rigorous controls for auditing and security which are needed to cover everyone’s backs but with the flexibility of encouraging collaboration and sharing.

Next time…

To illustrate some of these concepts, my next blog post will show how I would construct a Social Construction Project using IBM Connections.

Stay tuned or subscribe using the link on the side to be the first to receive a notification of the next article.

March 1, 2012

How to use a social intranet to unite a sales team

Setting up a structure in an intranet can be a tricky business. Many organisations follow the organisation tree and decide to structure sites, folders, etc based on the established hierarchy of the company. Others let it grow organically. In most cases the results of the former approach is that it turns into a data coffin because the only people who think along the lines of the org chart is the HR department. The latter approach, while encouraging adoption, just turns into a mess where no-one can find anything. Instead of being a functioning society of information it turns into little pockets of activity which no-one outside of the people using it a) know even exists b) would know where to go if it did exist.

Building a social intranet is therefore presumably even harder. On the one hand we have to create something which makes sense to allow people to work without being too prescriptive about the overall structure of the parts. Equally, we must realise that while it’s great to have an intranet site where we can all put stuff and find it later, the real value is in discovering stuff we didn’t know which is useful to us. If we focus our efforts in making something which our immediate co-workers think is cool, then we’re back to the pockets of activity scenario again.

Putting together a useful social intranet should address job functions rather than the organisation chart. Building a structure where the sales folks across the whole company, not just the sales people in your region can co-operate and share makes much more sense for the following reasons:

It will encourage the discovery of information not known to the local team. Each part of the organisation has its own information about stuff. Share it with like-minded individuals and you’re building organisational intelligence.
The sales teams will work more cohesively as an overall entity rather than competing racers in a relay race. Instead of handing out a prize to the best performing sales team at the Christmas Party, how about awarding the entire sales team a prize for sales growth? By having a structure where that team comes together fully, better performance is achieved.
There’s no single point of failure. Centralising information and intelligence rather than locking it away means that it’s available to all, rather than just that team.

So, given that you’re prepared to have a go at a cross-functional approach rather than an org-tree approach, how do you go about setting it up?

Firstly I’d encourage the creation of a community for the function, e.g. the Sales Community. Make each member of the Sales Team, wherever they are in the country, continent or planet a member. Provide some sort of profiling solution (such as that provided in IBM Connections) where everyone can see everyone else’s details. Include phone numbers, photos, email addresses and get some background information together either through tags or through a short bio. You’d be surprised at the delight a “random act of data kindness” can generate when you discover that you have something in common with someone across the organisation.

Next you need to seed the community. You need to identify sponsors across the functional group who are prepared to be the cheerleaders for the community. Pick people who are

a) enthusiastic about the concept and

b) will be known to the vast majority of people who will take part.

There’s little point in appointing the intern who’s hot on Facebook but not known outside of his immediate colleagues to advocate on the use of the system because he carries little kudos or respect (in a professional sense).

With a good size group – somewhere between 3 and 10 people depending on your organisation – get them together either physically or via an IBM Sametime web conference or similar. Explain to them the benefits to be gained from having a social intranet and set some short term highly-achievable goals for everyone to deliver on. For example, get them to post a blog entry each about what’s going on in their area and pose a question at the end of the entry which encourages comments to be made. Award a prize to the best comment the following week.

This is all about getting the social wheel spinning. Think about a party you’ve attended where the music has been playing but no-one is dancing. Once someone is brave enough to step out there and start making shapes it’s not long until the dancefloor is full. A social intranet is the same. It needs to be seeded and interaction needs to be sought.

Next start changing work practices. Broadcast your area’s news in the community so that the other folks hear about what’s happening. This becomes a very useful intelligence tool as the more information you can post, the more relevant it is likely to be to the other people. Suddenly you’ll discover that people you may never have met have had the same issues you’ve had and you’ll discover how they sorted it. This comes not by asking questions, but relating stories, describing experiences and seeking feedback.

Start making the Community the place where you put files your team are working on. Stop sending emails with file attachments. Instead use the Community as a place where your proposals, quotations, specifications, blueprints and other information gather. Tag these with the customer’s name, the product, whatever makes sense. I encourage you to make these public (within the community) so that any member can see them. This might be a big leap of faith but nothing drives process improvement better. If you discover a neat way that another region is doing a proposal, table, approach, diagram, anything, then it’s your duty to improve your own. Incorporate their ideas as you can be sure they’re getting something out of what you share. The result? A better proposal and possibly more success for everyone.

If you don’t have a dedicated CRM system, consider getting your sales team to blog about the meetings they have had with customers. Tag the entries with the customer’s name, the products, anything that’s relevant. Share the information and connections will be made.

Lastly, in your sales Community, use the Wiki to distill your knowledge. Product information, useful links, anything that helps you do your job will be of enormous value to your colleagues. That interesting presentation that you gave – prepare for it to be cannibalised and reused time after time by your co-workers.

In some organisations of course, such a co-operative sharing approach might be right against the corporate grain. Considering different sales teams as soldiers on the same side fighting the same battle rather than competing armies might seem like a utopian dream. With a little enthusiasm, a bit of perspiration and above all continuing effort over a reasonable period of time you will find that the social intranet quickly becomes indispensible and the approach you’ve taken for one community becomes your blueprint for wider rollout across the organisation.

February 28, 2012

Manage any meeting with Activities in IBM Connections

One thing we all do in business is attend meetings. Often we’re at the sharp end – taking notes, running the agenda and assigning actions. How often do key activities get missed when you’re writing up a meeting? Isn’t it a chore to format the actions and send them out (by sending a link to the document held centrally, of course!) only to have your colleagues read through, capture their actions and have them log those actions into whatever system they are using.

At the next meeting you go back through the same meeting minutes, get the list of actions, go round the table and hear what progress has been made and then start the whole palaver over again with this meeting’s business.

Sound familiar? There is a better way.

We use IBM Connections to run meetings. For our operations meetings, we have created a single activity called “Operations Meetings”. We created sections for the different years of notes so that the list doesn’t become too long, so this year our notes are all going into the 2012 section.

We then create an “Entry” in that Section. We give it the title of the date of the meeting and type the agenda for the meeting in the body of the entry. If we’re well organised we send out a notification to all those attending about this Entry so that they know what’s on the agenda for the next meeting.

At the meeting we of course go through the agenda. For each agenda point we create a comment against the Entry. The comment form affords us plenty of space to record any points we want to record about the agenda item. To help matters we always repeat the agenda item name in the first line of the comment so that when we look down the list later we can see that there are comments covering each of the agenda points.

Actions arising from these agenda points are raised as To Dos against the Comment. They’re assigned to the appropriate person and given a due date in keeping with the action. Multiple actioners each get a To Do entry.

And so through the agenda we go, creating Comments, To-Do’s and so forth. We get to the end of the meeting and discover:

The meeting minutes have been written
The actions have been assigned
Everyone now has their actions in their To Do List
No-one had a headache about producing meeting minutes
All the points were captured.

For me this one way of working with Activities presents one of the greatest productivity improvements now available in business. Because we’re avid Notes users we also benefit from the fact that Notes gives you a full page of space for as much information you want to type into each entity in the structure – much better than re-sizing a box in a browser.

Try it – it works!

February 20, 2012

Integrating Project Management with Sales using SugarCRM and IBM Connections

Every journey starts with the first step, and kicking a project off in the correct way is a sure first step to making sure that a quality job is delivered. We’ve automated these initial actions using Activities in IBM Connections and SugarCRM.

We have set up sections in an Activity Template which delinate the project into common phases, such as startup, shutdown and other phases. For those which have standard documentation types, we have created To Do entries with file attachments which hold the template of the document which should be created. We have provided bookmarks in the To Do entry to the relevant Wiki page (in Connections) which provides guidance on how to complete the document and what the next steps in the process are. Our Activity Template also has sections for emails, reference documents and other information which might be collected over time.

The Project Manager is at liberty to run his project as required, but our company guidelines around setup, initiation and shutdown of a project are now standardised.

We have gone one step further, however, in the automation of our project delivery structure. We use SugarCRM as our CRM system and now automatically create a Project in Sugar with the relevant financial information when an opportunity is won. The Project document in Sugar is marked as draft and lands on my desk for review. When I approve the document, some script behind the scenes uses IBM’s Social Business Toolkit and the REST APs within Connections to automate the generation of the Activity in our Projects Community. It correctly assigns the project manager, project team, project number, title and client details to the Activity. Because it uses the Activity Template which we’ve setup, the new project is defined in a standard way, assigned to the right people and set up ready for action.

The sales folks aren’t off the hook, however. One of the first tasks in our Project Activity is that the sales people must provide links to the proposal, quotations and anything else which would help the team produce a Statement of Work or Project Initiation Document. To-Do’s are raised in Activities flagged with the sales person as the actioner and these are managed by the Project Manager.

One nice side effect of this is that the activity shows up in the team member’s Activities sidebar in Lotus Notes. Our structure has an area for communications and other files relating to the project so they can immediately drag and drop emails they’ve collected on the project onto the Activity and thus share the information with the rest of the team.

Some activities become very large but the ability to section, indent and group items in the activity makes building a logical structure for the task in hand very easy. Because everything is there it also acts as an excellent overview and provides overall context which often gets lost when you’re in the middle of a difficult project.

Because the tasks being worked on by the team are managed in the activity and are plainly visible for everyone to see, there is less in the way of email cross-talk. A project email becomes something important rather than just more mindless detail a colleague wants to make sure he covers his backside with.

Importantly, we encourage our team to use our Projects Blog to document what they have been doing. If not for sharing with the others then for their own aide-memoire in the future. We’ve found it particularly useful if they tag entries with the job number (assigned originally by Sugar), the customer name and the technology they’re blogging about.

Combining the activity (which is the system of record for us) with the blog (which is both the system of record and of engagement) works really well and I would encourage others to give this approach a try.

This social project management approach should be appropriate in many industries. By reducing the email chatter and focusing on tasks and blogs a lot of the background noise gets filtered out. Using the comments in the blog as a way of discussing on record the contents of people’s “reports” is also a very valuable way of getting participation whilst using that as a means of capturing tacit knowledge.

Give it a go – you might be pleasantly surprised!

January 28, 2012

Who do your customers trust?

According to the Edelman Trust Report, 65% of customers see credibility in someone like themselves in your organisation – up 22% from 2011. Only 38% trust the CEO – down 12%. This decline in the CEO trust is the largest since Edelman started doing this work.

Making “the ordinary people” in your organisation engaged social employees means that your organisation’s brand reputation is more likely to be improved than when the CEO stands up and says you’re all great.

The public’s expectations of a trusted organisation rank the following (first is the most important) facets:

Listens to customer needs and feedback (67%)
Offers high quality products or services (67%)
Treats employees well (64%)
Places customers ahead of profits (62%)
Take responsible actions to address an issue or crisis (62%)
Has ethical business practices (60%)
Has transparent and open business practices (60%)
Communicates frequently and honestly on the state of its business (57%)

What does this list tell us? It tells us that listening, ethical, caring, communicative and transparent organisations is what customers want. By implication, organisations that behave in these ways will succeed.

How do organisations achieve these characteristics?:

By becoming a social business where the culture of the organisation encourages these facets.
By a senior exec close to the customer’s needs leading the breaking down of the organisational barriers to achieve openness and transparency
By recognising that the employees in the organisation are the people that your customers really listen to when they are seeking to trust your organisation.

I’d recommend anyone interested in social business transformation to take a look at the Edelman report and consider how IBM’s AGENDA for Social Business can provide practical steps to achieve these ends. Check out Sandy Carter’s slide deck on Slideshare, below:

Get Bold: Social Business Agenda- Presentation by Sandy Carter, VP Social Business Evangelist IBM Corporation

View more presentations from IBM_Lotus

January 26, 2012

Enabling application installation in Lotus Notes

This is something I constantly have to search for when I am installing a Lotus Notes client and want to install something like the IBM Connections Status Updates sidebar plugin.

To be able to install new features into Eclipse (Lotus Notes client) it is necessary to edit the plugin_customization.ini file which is buried in the installation folder of Lotus Notes.

Full details of this procedure can be found here, but for my own benefit if nothing else, here is a shortened version of the instructions to get me to where I need to go.

On the Mac

Shut down Lotus Notes
Right click on the Lotus Notes icon in the Applications folder and select Show Package Contents
Drill down to the /Contents/MacOS/rcp folder
Open plugin_customization.ini in TextEdit, or similar.
Add the following line of code to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
Save and close the file
Start Notes
The Install menu item appears under File, Application

On Windows

Shut down Lotus Notes
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to \notes install dir\framework\rcp ,e.g c:\program files\ibm\lotus\notes\framework\rcp
Open plugin_customization.ini in Notepad, or similar.
Add the following line of code to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
Save and close the file
Start Notes
The Install menu item appears under File, Application

January 26, 2012

IBM Docs part 2 – Social Spreadsheets and Presentations

Following on from yesterday’s blog entry about Social Documents in IBM Docs I wanted to finish my little series with a look at the other parts – Spreadsheets and Presentations.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are the staple of most businesses but I am sure 95% of us use only the very basic elements of a spreadsheet – columns, summing, sorting and the likes. IBM Docs reaches out to us casual users by providing the controls that most of us use plus the ability to export the documents into OpenOffice or Microsoft Office format for the real professionals.

Like with the other document types, the starting place for a new spreadsheet is your list of files. Click New and then Spreadsheet to get started.

The result is a pretty conventional-looking spreadsheet anyone these days would recognise:

To illustrate the use of the spreadsheet I am going to put together a short list of sales figures for a number of US states, get the total and then sort the results.

I’ve typed in my states and put some numbers in the next column. I behaves exactly like any other spreadsheet. In the row below the last number I want to put a total. Like in Excel or Symphony you use the sum function:

=sum(B1:B10)

Like in Excel, I press the equals sign then type SUM followed by the bracket. I can then drag across the cells (shown in red) for IBM Docs to pop the range into the formula). I finish my formula with a close bracket and hit return:

The result is shown as 610 in this example. No I want to sort my list of states into alphabetical order. I select the whole range of data and then choose Data, Sort from the menu bar. A dialog box comes up:

I click OK and guess what – the list is sorted.

Social Spreadsheet

While looking at the newly-sorted numbers I see that the California number is quite low. I decide to flag this for review by one of my colleagues. I click on the 19 next to California and choose Team, Comments. The side bar pops out and I can type in a comment. When I hit Add it appears in the list. A little orange triangle in the cell shows that there are comments about it.

OK, so I have made a comment, but what if I know that the value for Georgia is wrong and needs review. Rather than save the file and email it to one of my colleagues for review (and all the inherent problems that come with that), I choose to assign the Georgia value cell to one of my colleagues. Clicking on Team, Assign Cells brings up a dialog box:

Here IBM Docs allows me to create a new activity (in the activities area of Connections), give the task a title and assign it to someone with an instruction, due date and settings for their access.

The assignee gets an email and a link to the activity and spreadsheet and the ability to edit that value. I get a notification when the task is completed.

This ability to work socially and collaboratively on the same document is absolutely fantastic. It has been well thought-out by IBM and well integrated into Connections so that I can continue to work with it as the centre of my business activities.

The Good Citizen

Although IBM Docs spreadsheet currently lacks some of the high-end power which spreadsheet-jockeys would expect, there is a broad selection of functions available:

It also handles the round-trip to its desktop counterparts very well. By default IBM Docs stores the files as OpenOffice format and so opening them in, say, Lotus Symphony is as easy as downloading the file.

Download the file into Symphony:

I can also download and share in the traditional manner with my Excel counterparts:

The result is the same:

But what about something a bit more complex? Well, here’s an example I created in Excel recently. It’s a rollout plan for desktop computers:

Opening the file in IBM Docs produces this:

Pretty good for a browser! IBM Docs Spreadsheets is a competent, compatible and easy to use browser-based alternative to a desktop spreadsheet application. It is also excellent at working in a social setting by not only sharing but managing the collaborative editing of individual cells with your team members.

Presentations

Presentations in IBM Docs works much like the other document types. You log in, go to your files, and create a new Presentation file. When it opens you see the familiar opening slide:

It’s easy to change the master template to something a bit more interesting than the black and white:

Each of the text boxes is editable, so putting titles and text in is as easy as it is in PowerPoint:

Like its counterparts, IBM Docs Presentations is intended to be collaborative and social and so it becomes easy to flesh out a presentation and assign individual slides to your colleagues to work on, again without the messy need for sending emails with files around and then trying to merge the results:

Delivering a presentation

I must confess to having been a bit skeptical about how good a browser-based presentation would be. When you switch into Presenter mode, a new window pops up maximised to the size of your window. Pressing F11 puts you into full screen mode:

Clicking the mouse on up/down on the cursor keys is all you need to move through the slides like you would in PowerPoint.

For a bit of pizzazz, IBM Docs Presentations also includes slide transitions. Here’s an example screencast of transitions working in a web browser window:

Summary

In summary therefore I hope you can see that IBM Docs brings something new to the world of browser-based office productivity. It gives you the familiar controls and features virtually all of us use on a daily basis but removes the headache of trying to manage the input of others into your work. By working socially and collaborating on the content you can use IBM Docs to smoothly prepare for that big presentation, or review that document in a way which I believe is unique in the market.

Thanks for sticking with me on this two-part series, I hope that you’ve found this look at IBM Docs useful and would love to hear your comments.

January 25, 2012

IBM Docs beta – Social Document Creation

IBM Docs is the new name for the technology preview which was previously called IBM LotusLive Symphony. It essentially is IBM’s foray into the browser-based office productivity suite and competes at some levels with Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365.

So what does IBM Docs have going for it that the others don’t?

Its free
It supports real time collaboration on a document – i.e. two people working on the same document at the same time.
It’s compatible with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office document formats.
It will be available as an on-premises install as well as IBM-hosted cloud offering.

For me its the last of these points which will allow organisations to really make the leap into a much simpler, integrated and browser-based IT model. If your organisation isn’t yet ready to embrace a private or public cloud offerings, IBM Docs is one of the first to offer you the benefits of browser-based document editing, but hosted on your own servers in your own premises.

So what does IBM Docs do and how good is it?

IBM Docs is currently available for you to play around with on IBM’s Lotus Greenhouse site. The screenshots in this blog post are from that system and I recommend you have a go with your own documents to get a feeling for the features.

Creating a wordprocessing document

When you click on the New Document button, you’re asked to provide the name of a document to create. After this, you see the following screen:

You begin typing like you would in any other word processor.

As you can see from the above, it supports the usual headings and text formatting controls we’ve become used to. More complex documents are also supported with tables and other special layouts.

So far, nothing much different from other online document editors. However, lurking under the Team menu option, or if you pop the sidebar out you find that the social aspects appear.

Social Word Processing

IBM Docs lets you assign different sections of the document to different users, with actions to be assigned and workflow around the review. In the screenshot below I have created a couple of sections, one for me to work on and one for my colleague Martin to work on.

Martin and I can now collaboratively work on the document, constrained in this case by the sections I have set up. When I have done my part, I can mark my section complete and move it onto the next section of the workflow.

In the above example I have entered my text. When I click on Mark Complete an email is sent to the approver (me in this case). As the approver I have a number of options to progress the edit:

If I come out of the IBM Docs document and then go to Activities on Greenhouse, I find that a new activity has been created for my document because I created assignments on the different sections. Opening the Activity up shows the different tasks, the assignments and the current status of those assignments:

Because these assignments are treated like any other in Activities, they now appear in my To Do list in Connections. If I have set up the Activities sidebar in the Notes client, they’ll be there too. Particularly nice is the fact that the individual entries in the Activity contain a link to the document itself.

Sharing your document with others

IBM Docs offers a broad range of options for sharing your work with others. The obvious one is that you can share the document online and send people a link. However, the concern that probably most people have about such an online system is the ability to save the document as a Word or other format file.

The good news is that this is easy to achieve.

Simply select More Actions, Download as Microsoft Office to download your document in Microsoft office format.

The result, as you can see above is a very acceptable rendition of the document, in this case shown in Microsoft Office Word 2011 for the Mac.

Uploading your own documents

Having shown how good IBM Docs is at creating and sharing documents, what about uploading pre-existing documents into it? I uploaded a proposal document I created as a .docx file (new Office format) into IBM docs.

As you can see, IBM Docs does a pretty good job at rendering it in a working format. Here’s the original in Word:

Next time I’ll take a look at the features of the Spreadsheet area in IBM Docs. I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the Technical Preview of IBM Docs.