New IBM LotusLive Meetings for iPhone and iPad
This week we released the new iOS Lotuslive Meetings App. This is a great way to follow a Lotuslive Meeting while on the go.
I’ve got it installed on an
iPad 2 and an iPhone 3GS both running the new iOS 5. The app is very slick. You can now slide through previous shown slides in the presentation with your finger, and you will even see the highlights and drawings made by the presenter.
Here are the links for you:
Functionality now includes:
-View live shared desktop content,presentations, and documents.
-View the list of meeting participants.
-Participate in group and individual chats.
-Get the presenter’s attention by virtually raising your hand in a meeting.
-Browse through slides that have been shared during a meeting.
-Listen to the audio for the meeting in the background while viewing the meeting content.
Below you see a screenshot from the app running on the iPad:
Lotuslive Meetings on iPad
White paper: IBM Technical Strategy for Social Business
Understand the technology behind IBM’s social business
People don’t do business with companies. People do business with people.
Companies who have successfully embedded social technologies in their organizations and in their corporate culture are referred to as a Social Business by IBM.
It boils down to exploiting a set of innovations in social technologies to drive greater operational effectiveness, deepen relationships with customers, and optimize the workforce. If you want to understand the technical underpinnings, then this white paper is highly recommendable (Note – when clicking the link below, you need to expand the attachment section to download the pdf):
White paper: IBM Technical Strategy for Social Business
The attached white paper from the above link, is an overview of the two main components that make up IBM’s technical strategy for social business — the Social Business Framework and the Social Business Toolkit. It covers the social capabilities that are being developed for the Framework as well as the standards-based mechanisms the Toolkit provides for integrating with the Framework.
The technology innovation described in the white paper is being embedded in many of IBM’s products. Moreover you can use some of these technologies already today to build your own social applications.
/Henrik Hammer
Your Lotuslive Cloud just got 99 new features…
Over the last months I have worked on a couple of projects where I have used Lotuslive to collaborate internally and externally. In particular I have enjoyed working with communities, which is a great way to collaborate inside and across your organizational boundaries. People I have worked with have been amazed by how much more efficient you can be as compared to traditional email. As an example you can share files securely, create activities and thus assign and track work tasks to members of your community. By comparison, traditional collaboration via email really is a thing from a distant past – I’ll never go back, nor will the people I have worked with over the last months.
So it was a great joy for me to learn that Lotuslive recently got 99 new features, which will allow me to collaborate even more intelligently. Below I’ll look at some of the new stuff in Communities.
However, first I would like to reflect upon the fact, that I got all these new capabilities without having to do anything. Because Lotuslive is collaboration in the cloud, they all became available to me as part of the update of Lotuslive which took place over the first weekend of May.
If you don’t know already Lotuslive is updated every 3-4 months. Compare this to how often you get to enjoy new features from on-premises software? Often people have to wait for years before their internal IT departments schedule major functionality updates, so using a cloud service really allows me to adopt innovative new features at a much more rapid pace.
So what are the 99 new features exactly?
There are 2 great places to go to find out:
Firstly, there is the official Lotuslive wiki: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/bhwiki.nsf/dx/Whats_New_in_LotusLive.
Secondly Erik Vos published a great post on the Lotuslive Blog:
http://lotusliveblog.com/blog/lotuslive.nsf/dx/lotuslive-gains-99-new-features-in-the-new-spring-release
Here he used the new charting functionality in Lotuslive to graphically depict the new features in Lotuslive Engage – according to component they belong to:
As you can see, there has been a lot of updates (35 in total) to the Community component. Among others the ability to add Subcommunities. I think this greatly improves the value of a community.
Sometimes communities grow big over time and it adds a lot to its structure and easy of navigation to divide it into Subcommunities. You can restrict access to a Subcommunity to certain people or groups, and you can create separate activites or Forums (aka blogs) in these Subcommunities.
Here is a screenshot of a Community I created which have 2 Subcommunities embedded:
Collections in Lotuslive are now called folders. Again from a Community perspective, you can now share not only files but also folders with your Community or Subcommunity. Like most people I like to organize my files (even when they are tagged) in folders, so this is also a welcome change, as it allows me to share multiple related files with a particular workgroup.
To futher add to the flexibility of a Community you can now move individual 
posts in a Forum to other Forums in the Community where the post may be more relevant.
I have taken a quick screenshot of the move modal window here to the right. As you can see I can move the topic “Presentations” to another forum. In this case to Forum2, where I want this topic to appear.
These were but some of the new collaborative features in Lotuslive. There are many more and new ones get added every 3-4 months. Again it is collaboration in the cloud, so if you have an account, you can enjoy these new features without any installs on your side. So stay tuned, and enjoy collaboration in the cloud 
If you would like to try out Lotuslive go to https://www.lotuslive.com/en/trial. The trial lasts 60 days.
