IBM Connections 4.5 coming in March 2013

2013-01-30

At IBM Connect 2013 (previously known as Lotusphere) this week, they have presented details of the March release of IBM Connections 4.5. Michael Sampson provided some rough but detailed notes about the new features in this release.

UPDATE: There are also some details on the Perficient blog.

Scanning the list for the highlights, there is a good spread of user interface, mobile app and back-end improvements.

End-users in particular will welcome the new @ mentions and the ability to like within the main activity stream. This might sound like IBM has been lagging on a feature that is common place in other social platforms, however the way Connections is architected around apps rather than just an activity stream means that this isn't really a defining feature, but very nice to have now.

Australian department store, David Jones, also featured as a case study at IBM Connect 2013. Again, Michael has provided the best coverage so far of that case study. David Jones participated in an IBM event I presented at last November, when they were at the beginning of their journey, so its great to see them making good progress with their IBM Connections implementation.

Also of note is the IBM's recent acquisition of Kenexa, which is being bundled with Connections as the Employee Experience Suite.

BTW If you are a member of IBM's Greenhouse demo site you can try out some of the features already (@ mentions, likes in the main activity stream) plus IBM Docs.