Social Networking with IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 Workshop

Prerequisites:

You should have:

* Good technical understanding of Internet concepts
* General understanding of object-oriented programming concepts, systems and languages

Also helpful, but not required are:

* Some knowledge of Web 2.0 concepts
* Previous experience with Lotus Sametime or WebSphere Portal
* Familiarity with the Rational Application Developer (or Eclipse) development environment

Course Description:

IBM Lotus Connections is social software for businesses that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers.

In this workshop, you will learn how this software enables you to promote collaboration and innovation by connecting people with common work objectives or professional interests. It helps you harness the inherent social drives of the people in and around your company, and makes it easy for people to connect in new ways - which is the key to unlocking and leveraging all the skills within your organization and beyond. You will learn how to leverage the eight integrated services for social networking delivered by Lotus Connections 2.5. You will hear about and use the functions and features that capture, communicate, share, collaborate, organize, and deliver social software for business.

Objectives:

• Become familiar with the setup and use of Lotus Connections features
• Understand the functions provided by each feature
• Understand how the features work with each other and how to incorporate them with other applications and Web sites
• Learn how to use the tools and underlying servers to configure the products for use
• Participate in hands-on labs

This course includes the following modules:

Profiles

• Search for and find people based on criteria such as name, organization, location, reporting structure, and interests.

Communities

• Groups of people who share a common interest can collaborate with one another by exchanging and sharing information or interacting with one another using IBM Lotus Sametime and e-mail.

Blogs

• Communicate with your peers or colleagues and nourish innovation.

Bookmarks

• Save, organize, and share bookmarks; discover bookmarks qualified by others with similar interests and expertise.

Activities

• Track your work with a dashboard; invite and share your tasks with others; and manage work items.

Files

• Store, share and find intellectual capital utilizing social software features such as ratings, comments, and tags.

Wikis

• Create wiki sites to collectively author documents with others; Built-in revision history makes it a snap to rollback to previous versions.

Home Page

• Customize the look and feel of your front-end and integrate other Web-based applications using iWidget framework.

Mobile Interface

• Access your services using a mobile device friendly interface that enhances usability on devices such as iPhone and Nokia s60.

Deployment and Connections

• Available development tools
• How to deploy, configure, and use each feature of Lotus Connections
• How to incorporate the features in existing applications and Web sites
• How to use APIs that interact with connection features