As social tools become mainstream within organisations, inevitably businesses and users are going to have to deal with multiple platforms. A classic example would be the co-existance of a niche tool (such as a blog or wiki application) with a more complete social platform (such as Jive, Connections or SharePoint).
Increasingly, we are seeing organisations who have been using Confluence as their wiki platform look at IBM Connections as a wider social networking tool. We’ve already looked at one integration point, adding Confluence wikis to Connections communities, and were disappointed with the results. This becomes especially tricky now that Connections ships with its own (rather good, actually) wiki component in version 2.5.
There is one point of integration, however, which works well. One of the strengths of IBM Connections is its profile system, based on IBM’s internal corporate directory. This has been designed to be extended to other platforms, so you can access Connections profile information from other applications. Within Confluence, linking names to Connections profiles works pretty well. Whenever someone’s name appears in Confluence you can still access their Confluence profile, but also access details of their profile and contributions in Connections. This is shown in the screenshot below but we’ve also put together this video showing Confluence integrated with the Connections business card.
If your organisation has been using Confluence for a while, pushing Connections information into the flow of users’ existing workflows can be a powerful tool to increase engagement and adoption.
Please get in touch if you would like to understand more about integrating Confluence and Connections, or any other social platforms.
Many thanks to Luis Benitez for invaluable information to help get this working!
This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.
