While everyone is anxiously awaiting for Snow Leopard to hit the shelves (Apples’ latest upgrade to OS X 10) later on today, if not already, my attention is actually elsewhere. For the time being, I am not planning on upgrading till a number of critical applications I use on a daily basis on my MacBook Pro are fully compatible with it. But, like I said, my attention today is going to be elsewhere.
A few details are coming along already on another major announcement that I have been waiting for months to take place! And it’s finally here! IBM’s Lotus Connections v2.5 is at last available for download! Yay!! My fellow colleague, and good friend, Luis Benitez, has already been sharing some details over at Lotus Connections 2.5 Is Now Available for Download. I am sure there will be plenty of other folks jumping in as well very shortly with more information related to today’s announcements. And relevant information resources are starting to become available for everyone as well, like the Lotus Connections v2.5 Information Center repository.
I am certain, at this point in time, that you may be wondering why I am so excited about the announcement of this release from Lotus Connections, right? Well, there are plenty of them! But the main one is that, finally, I will have a great opportunity to share with everyone out there, interested in the topic, how Lotus Connections v2.5 is *the* main Enterprise Social Software tool that I use rather heavily on a daily basis to help me escape corporate email and live "A World Without Email".
Yes, that’s right! Most of you folks know by now that I have been making use of a social software tools suite all along to help me diversify and fragment successfully my email Inbox to the point that over 90% of my daily interactions happen elsewhere than through email. And of the 90% of interactions a good chunk, around 70%, perhaps, happen through Lotus Connections v2.5 and its various different components.
I have been using all of the new features and enhancements that v2.5 has been putting together and making available for download today for a few months now in our internal deployment and from the very beginning I have been commenting several times how without this fundamental release taking place this year I probably wouldn’t have been as successful in giving up on corporate email as I have shown over the last few months (See yesterday’s post as an example, for instance).
Thus the exciting thing for me for today is not just the availability of Connections v2.5 for everyone to download or upgrade to, but more the fact that from today onwards I will have an opportunity to share with you all, and show you!, how I am living "A World Without Email" by making use of my primary Enterprise Social Software tool: Lotus Connections.
And that’s the main reason why I am titling this entry as "Using IBM Lotus Connections 2.5", because that’s what I will be doing over the next few weeks, every so often, and, perhaps, as part of the weekly progress reports themselves, more than anything else to show and share with everyone a good number of use cases that you can apply to your day to day tasks and activities, so that you can see how embedding social software into your daily workflow is not as tough and difficult to achieve as most people would think.
Should be quite an interesting and fun journey sharing with everyone out there how I eventually work on a daily basis, pretty much like the fascinating blog post that Stowe Boyd put together a few days back on "being an onfovore" and which I can surely relate to quite a bit (A must read, by the way, if you are into social networking and social software in general).
For now though I am going to leave you with a couple of teasers of what you may be expecting over the next few weeks. And that’s basically by sharing with you a couple of very interesting resources I am sure you are going to enjoy. The first one is a screencast, divided in multiple chunks of a just a few seconds each and making a total amount of nearly 42 minutes, and titled "Using IBM Lotus Connections 2.5" and which you can find over here. It’s one of those very helpful resources that will provide you with a good solid overview of what to expect from Connections and a good rundown of the various new features.
And while talking about general overviews, you may also want to have a look into this other resource, which I think you are going to find very relevant as well. It’s a YouTube video that features the one and only, the demo master, Ron Sebastian, who over the course of nearly 7 minutes he gets to explain some of the new features folks would be able to find in Lotus Connections v2.5, including a live demo with some snapshots. You would be able to get the direct link from here or, alternatively, check out the embedded version below:
And that would be it for now folks. Enough teasing. Can’t wait to share with everyone out there how if I have been able to reduce my incoming count of emails by over 90% perhaps you could, too! Why not? The choice is ours, don’t you think?
Tags: Snow Leopard, OS X, Apple, Mac, MacBook Pro, Lotus Connections, Connections, Lotus Connections 2.5, Connections 2.5, Information Center, Stowe Boyd, Onfovore, Screencasts, Tutorials, Education, Resources, Training, YouTube, Ron Sebastian, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Use Cases, Business Value, Value Add
