My views on IBM Social Business, Enterprise Collaboration and Knowledge Discovery.
The recent announcements about the release into the wild of IBM Docs made me realize I had an opportunity at shameless self-promotion. At the beginning of this year I blogged about the features of IBM Docs beta as it was on Greenhouse.
If you’re looking for a quick summary of just how good IBM Docs really is, take a look at these posts:
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 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.
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.
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 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:
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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:
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a passionate believer in the use of social collaboration tools to enhance the way people work. I demonstrate how these tools can enhance the communication, collaboration and capture of information in organisations of all sizes.
I have nearly 20 years experience of helping to solve customer problems through the implementation of collaborative systems. In this time I have been lucky enough to turn many customer relationships into long term friendships.
I work for IBM in the worldwide Collaboration Solutions Tiger Team.
I hope you enjoy reading my blog and would encourage you to be social by tweeting me, linking with me on LinkedIn or posting comments.
