Sorry for being late with following up on the Connect 2017 conference, but the last days in San Francisco just flew by like a whirlwind. And after I got home I was stuck on the couch with flu like symptoms. But now I’m ready to talk to you about the future of IBM Connections, which is pink!
IBM Connections 6.0 is soon ready to be unleashed on the world. And I think it looks very promising. In fact, I was grinning when I was told about some of the new functionality. Here are the highlights from the new stuff that is coming:
- Much better file syncing with top level folders
- Onboarding manuals and guided tours for new users to get them familiarised with Connections much quicker
- Much better control over community layouts
- You will be able to copy community designs and thus create community templates
- Integrated notifications which also will work with Microsoft Outlook
- Improved mobile client with much better search possibilities and a day-at-a-glance summary
- My Drive view for your synced folders, which also includes nested folders
- The rich text editor will now be the same for all applications in Connections (blogs, wikis, forums etc)
- Hide widgets in a community without having to delete them
The point I really, really liked was the fact that you now can make the area that describes what the community is about as large as you like. AND: You can now just paste whatever HTML code you like into that area! This means that you very easily can create your own social intranet without having to skin Connections to fit your internal design guidelines. This is a very smart move by IBM, and I like it! It’s something my previous employer was desperately hoping for, and was promised was possible, only to find out it wasn’t.
The future for Connections beyond 6.0 is Pink! Now, what does Connections Pink mean? It’s not the next version of Connections, per se. It’s more a new way of developing the platform, developing towards and with the platform, the way it will be updated and a new way to work, not only with Connections but with Watson and the ICS portfolio.
Highlights:
- The deployment of updates will be container based and continueous instead of usual 18 months release cycles
- There will be no more need for huge and costly upgrades to “the next version”
- The experience will be more consistent between the web version and mobile apps
- Cloud and on prem-customers will have a more similar experience than today
- Much better separation between service layers and presentations, which will make it much easier to do your own customisations
- The APIs will be improved heavily. This means it’s much easier to replace Connections applications with third party applications
- The new APIs will also make it easier to develop your own solutions to work with Connections
Connections Pink is also a new development platform which makes it easier for people to contribute by creating your own extensions for Connections. It’s a completely open ecosystem which is made for developers, with a new technology stack. This is probably the most exciting new thing coming out of Connect 2017. The plan is to make this available from September 2017. Personally I can’t wait to play around with it.
It will also be amazing to combine this with the development platform for Watson Workspace. Just think of the possibilities you will have to analyse usage, data and a whole lot of other parameters. This is exciting, and I truly hope IBM will communicate this out to its customers. And most important: Use their IBM partners to help people understand what it is and all the possibilities it gives you!
Oh by the way, it was great to see that the Connections sessions were filled up. It’s obvious that a lot of IBM’s customers now are using IBM Connections. Wonderful