October 12, 2012. Today IBM posted an update to the Google Play store of the app for IBM Connections. This app now supports connecting to a Connections 4 server as well as Connections 3.x. You can easily try it if you have a Greenhouse account.
Update: Congratulations to our design team: Grif Friedman (a Yankee fan, but I won’t hold that against him!) and new mom, Carrie Lloyd. Also, the development, qe, and product mgmt team’s all worked together to make this a reality!
New features for Connections 4 include:
- Activity Streams. You can get updates from people and content you are following or just the status updates for people. A long press brings up options such as launching a URL, pivot to the user’s profile, search by hashtag, and (depending on the type of entry) going directly to the object – i.e. the File, Blog, Wiki, etc. This powerful feature should make it easier to keep up with your content in Connections.
- In Status Updates, you can include your location and a photo or video.
- OpenSocial gadgets added to the activity stream will render in an embedded browser window.
- Community Events. View and respond (Follow, Comment, Attend) to events in your communities.
- Post a message to a community board.
- Forums. Updated to be faster, better integrated, and generally nicer. That means we gave them a makeover. 🙂
- Files. Mostly updated the icons to match Connections 4. Also added a view for Community Files.
In addition, for Connections 4 servers, there are some basic, yet necessary security configurations. You can now register devices, enforce a configuration profile (i.e. require a password), deny access, and perform a remote wipe.
Check out some of the new screens of the activity stream, status update, and a tag search.
Here is the activity stream for a person and a community (updates were part of the app June release, but this uses the activity stream UI). Personally, I’m loving the community stream because is lets me keep up with all of the activity in the community in one spot, then link directly to the file, blog, wiki, etc. Huge productivity gain (and this is also in the desktop browser version!).
Two screenshots of forums, one with the updated list view, including information like questions and answered posts. You’ll notice the way we have dealt with the response hierarchy for the forums with those bars on the left side. It should be clear which part of the thread you are replying to, also.
There’s more I could show you, but you’ll have to download the app yourself and try it. Helpful comments on the app store are appreciated by us and by your fellow users. We think you’ll like this update.
(and before you ask, I cannot speak about other updates that may or may not be coming)
Chris Reckling
Mobile UX
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Chris Reckling | 12 October 2012 06:45:00 PM ET |
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