Watson Workspace Cognitive Collaboration Integrated with Buzzy Instant Apps

Yesterday IBM launched the Watson Workspace Essentials which is the first release of Workspace that is enterprise ready following the previous pre-release. I have been using and watching from the continual improvement of Workplace since it was first pre-released and over this time I have found more and more of my conversations moving from Sametime and Slack over to Workspace.

In short Workspace is a real time collaboration app that provides group and individual persistent chat, plus some built in cognitive capabilities that basically helps me to cut thru the noise and quickly focus on what matters. There is some great integrations with other cloud services via IFTTT and Workato. One of the capabilities that we have been exploring more of is the developer experience.

Workspace leverages the underlying Work Services Platform which provides a Webhooks API, Graph API, and Cognitive API's. Using these tools we have been looking at how we can intergrate Workspace with Buzzy Instant Apps and Buzzy for IBM Connections. My colleague and namesake Adam Ginsburg (he surf's while I cook on the grill. That is the key difference) created a quick Geek Sneak preview video yesterday to show off some of the integrations we have created between Buzzy and Watson Workspace.

Cool eh! If you would like some more info or have a play with Buzzy just let us know here

IBM Connect 2017 - Top 5 Highlights

Well what a huge week! There were so many interesting things going on at IBM Connect 2017 last week in San Francisco. I had some fantastic conversations with colleagues around the world and that is probably the most important part of Connect. Learning from others experiences, thinking about our future path, just fantastic.

Yet how to sum it up! Well here are my top 5 highlights for IBM Connect 2017. Let me know what yours were?

Australia rocking the IBM Champion program!!!

Just woke to the news that I have been selected again as an IBM Champion for Social Business for 2016, now for 5 years running. Woot!!!! Thank you IBM. The Champion program is an awesome group of experts and evangelists around the world and I am always humbled to be part of this group. More so thru the program I have developed some great friendships with people all around the world. It is always great to catch up with them at the various events and knowing I have people I can reach out to in so many countries to say hi is a wonderful thing.

And the even more exciting news is that Australia now has 2 IBM Champions with Karen Hooper being also selected, I am sure in main for her awesome work leading the AusLUG/Inform committee. Great to see another Aussie being selected and I am sure there are more to come in future years. Congrats Karen and well done.

Inform Australia (a.k.a. AusLUG) call for Speaker Abtracts

The awesome team organising Inform Australia 2014 (previously AusLUG) have announced the new dates for the event, being Sept 4th & 5th Sept in Melbourne. This will be the 4th annual event and it is great to have it back in Melbourne for the 2nd time.

Inform recently announced that the event is open now for speakers to submit abstracts. Having been fortunate enough to speak at the previous events I can only encourage everyone to have a go and share your knowledge. Developers, Administrators, Users, Managers, Business people, IBMers....all sessions ideas are welcome and the audience tend to be great and interactive. Connections, Domino, Sametime, Traveller, Smartcloud, Talent Suite and Kenexa, Digital Experience, Forms, Portal, Worklight, User Adoption, Success Stories, technical or business, or even just a general topic related to collaboration.

So go on, give it a go. I guarantee you won't regret it. To submit an abstract just head over to the Inform site, register, and then just submit a session from your Profile page.

Kudos Badges for IBM Connections 1.3

The team at ISW has been working hard on the latest release of Kudos Badges, Version 1.3! Since Lotusphere we have had our clients provide plenty of feedback and ideas on how to leverage Kudos Badges to encourage user adoption of IBM Connections and these ideas have been added to our development cycle for the products.

Here is some of the new features and capabilities in our latest release:

Kudos Leaderboard

Our new Leader Boards are Context Aware and feature Time Based Ranks to be more relevant and competitive.

• The Context Aware Kudos Leaderboards display the ranks relative to the person logged in. This lets the user see his immediate competition with the option of navigating through the ranks.
• Time Based Ranks on the Leader Boards can now be filtered based on Time enabling new and existing users to start afresh and to always keep the competition alive. By Default the time intervals are set to 30 days, 180 days, 365 days and All-Time but they can be changed to suit your environmen. 
• Leader Boards in the Communities are now based on Content and Members in the Community! The Ranks in a Community therefore reflect the actual contribution from the members to the Community’s content.

Kudos Profile Progress Widget

Encourage your users to get started in Connections! - The Profile Progress Widget displays a progress bar indicating a Profile’s maturity level and gives users ideas to improve it based on what the Profile is lacking. This can include content items such as Contact Information, Tags, Background, and Photo's, as well as Actions the user should take such as join a community, create a blog post, tag another user etc! This widget uses existing Kudos Metrics to measure in real-time the level of completion of a Profile. What makes this feature really powerful is that it is completely configurable allowing you to fine tune it to your environment and what you would like your users to do!

Multilingual Support

Kudos Badges now has the option of defining and editing Badges in all the languages supported by Connections 3.0.1 with full character support. This capability is clearly required for global organisations that utilise IBM Connections across multiple languages. The great thing about how this works is that it is on a per user basis so the users can choose which language they want Kudos Badges to display in, exactly the same way as IBM Connections does!

Kudos Filters

Easier More Powerful Configuration of Badges and Ranks - In addition to Kudos Metrics we now have Kudos Filters. Filters can be used on Base Metrics to narrow down the search criteria with the use of Parameters. This makes the configuration of Badges and Ranks much more powerful. You can create Metrics and Filters for every single action that someone can take in IBM Connections, as well as Actions that other users take on another users Content!

Improved Kudos Awards Engine

The Kudos Engine responsible for awarding the Badges is now enhanced for performance and scalability. This enables even the largest IBM Connections implementations to utilise Kudos Badges as well as allowing you to award users more frequently for better feedback to the users.

We have already started working on Kudos Badges 1.4 with some exciting new capabilities and if you have any ideas on how Kudos Badges can help to further improve user adoption of IBM Connections we would love to hear from you.

If you would like an update on Kudos Badges please Contact Us or one of our various Partners around the world.