News

Our series of interviews with HCL executives continued a week later during Czech Lotus user group gathering in Prague. This time I had an opportunity to talk to Richard Jefts regarding HCL Digital Solutions strategy and innovation and to Luis Guirigay regarding the upcoming product education and certifications. You can watch the interviews on the following links:

• LetsConnect Interviews at Sutol Richard Jefts, Senior Vice President & General Manager HCL Software – Digital Solutions at HCL Technologies
• LetsConnect Interviews at Sutol – Luis Guirigay, Senior Global Director at HCL Software

Please check also our other videos on our Youtube channel.

Let’sConnect’s Jan Valdman and Wannes Rams visited the Engage user group event in Bruges last week, our face to face conference in over 2 years. It was a great event with over 300 attendees.

You can find the interviews on our Youtube channel

• Jan Valdman with Jason Roy Gary, CTO, Vice President Engineering and Innovation, Digital Solutions at HCL Technologies
• Wannes Rams with Maria Nordin, Program manager Ambassadors and User Groups, Digital Solutions HCL
• Wannes Rams with Rene Schimmer and Adam Gartenberg, Product Managers for HCL Connections at Digital Solutions HCL

 

There were also some interesting Connections sessions, slides links included where possible

• HCL Connections Roadmap: Faster Deployment, Better Integration, Reinvented User Experience with Rene Schimmer and Adam Gartenberg
• HCL Digital Solutions Product Strategy with Andrew Manby
• Connections Admin Toolbox 2022 with Christoph Stoettner
• Build a Collaborative framework for your business applications with Communities with Urs Meli and Wannes Rams
• Delivering an engaging content creation experience within your organization with Kate Bazilevskaya
• Understanding collaborative work in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms with Petra Schubert, Martin Just and Julian Mosen
• HCL Connections fully implemented at accounting firm NEVB with Roland Driesen and Gert van Kempen
• Long-term management of digital workspaces and content with Susan Williams and Julian Mosen
• Building a dynamic digital workplace hub by integrating on prem and cloud services with Bernd Gewehr
• What is the Importance of having Ambassadors, Guides or Super Users within HCL Connections ? with Femke Goedhart and Jörg Rafflenbeul ( Roundtable, no slides)
  
• Connections v8 Live Demo: Collaboration just got easier! with David Bell and Stefan Hessler

 

We are happy to say that we have lots of good content for you to watch and read from Let’sConnect Connects!

We give you for example several sessions from HCL on where HCL Connections is heading, a keynote from Richard Jefts and Andrew Manby, a session on how you can customize HCL Connections to tailor it matching your wishes, and also a session on research on the flora of tools for enterprise collaboration.

Find presentations from sessions here.

On our Youtube channel we showcase both new and previous sessions for you to rewatch.

For example:

HCL Keynote: The State of Collaboration in 2021 and Beyond

Enterprise Collaboration: A Zoo of Tools – Current Strategies behind Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

The Connections Roadmap: A First Glimpse at v8.0

HCL Connections Customizer

We hope we will see you next time!

Should you want to contact us, you can always reach us at team@letsconnect.world

 

We’ll go straight to the point: The agenda for our 2 half day September event is published!

We have for example several interesting sessions from HCL Offering Management scheduled. For example “Connections v8” and “Business Value of Connections”. And more!

We hope this intrigues you as much as it does to us, so head on over to our website to take a look and register! (Scroll down for some highlights.)

Join us on 28 – 29 September 2021 at 3 pm CET to hear news from HCL and the Let’sConnect team.

 

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Enterprise Collaboration: A Zoo of Tools – Current Strategies behind Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

Join this session and hear about the different approaches used by user organisations to develop their software portfolio for Enterprise Collaboration.

We are going to discuss the complex collaborative technology landscape in order to understand the evolving portfolios of collaboration software currently in use in organizations. This will include the examination of different areas of collaboration activity that these tools support and the areas of overlapping and redundant functionality. We will present findings from a study of 23 user organisations in which we identified three dominant strategies. In this session, you will learn how the companies in our sample are addressing the zoo of software tools to shape their Enterprise Collaboration Platform.

 

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The Connections Roadmap: A First Glimpse at v8.0

We have shared our plans for HCL Connections 8 in the past so you have probably heard about or even seen the new designs by now. But let us give you a refresher on what the development teams are working on.

 

Register here

 

We have news for you! Our September conference which was planned to take part in Madrid, will instead be a virtual one.

As much as we had hoped to gather the community this fall, we have taken the decision to postpone a face to face event to later. Even though the world is gradually openening up, there are still hurdles we feel will be too big at this stage.

In the meantime we want to make sure that the waiting is worthwhile! We are inviting you to a 2 half day online event taking place on the 28-29 September 2021.

We already have several interesting sessions from HCL Offerings Management scheduled, on the future of Connections. And more!.

We now invite you to participate with a session if you feel you have a topic you think might interest the Connections community. If you would like to submit an abstract, please email us at team@letsconnect.world

We have already opened up the registration for the event here.

Agenda and more information will be published in the next coming days.

Let’sConnect soon!

Summer holidays are getting closer for many of us, and for some winter is coming. Regardless times are changing and we look forward to a hopefully more open world where we can finally gather the community live!

In the meantime we welcome you to our bi-monthly webinar!

Join us on June 29, 2021 at 3 pm CEST to hear news from HCL and the Let’sConnect team.

Agenda snippets below:

HCL Connections news

At our last online event we collected the latest and greatest news all about HCL Connections and presented it to our attendees. We got good feedback on this, so we will of course repeat this news section!

Kickstart with the HCL Connections Engagement Centre

Join this session to learn how to kickstart HCL Connections Engagement Center. Roger will take you through the steps of creating a base intranet page brining content in from HCL Connections and other sources. In 45 minutes you can have a simple intranet. Roger will also show you how to create a separate intranet page for visitors so you don’t expose internal data to them.

Roger Zirn: As a Senior Software Engineer at Belsoft Collaboration AG, Roger gathered his HCL Connections experiences during installations, troubleshooting, administering and customizing tasks for several on-prem as well as for ThreeThirds cloud customers. He started to work in the collaboration area as an HCL Notes and Domino developer 30 years ago (actually, at this time it was called Lotus Notes developer). You can still find him coding @Formulas and LotusScript… sometimes.

Please register for the event  in order to receive the webinar link. The event is free!

We are looking forward to see you soon.

Maria, Wannes, Matteo, Martin and Jan

Hi,

today we are happy to bring you some details regarding our first online event in this year – which will take place on March 16 3pm CET! Let us connect together to hear some news regarding WHAT from HCL. We are thrilled to learn more about the next release of Connections later in this year and how it will meet your expectations.

Our main speaker will be Fabio Gervasoni from HCL design team, who will show us how to create attracting and engaging communities.

Take your Communities to the next level

Connections 7 offers new ways of tweaking and customizing the homepage layout of your community and new capabilities made possible by new Connections templates. In this session, Fabio Gervasoni, head of the HCL Connections Design team, will share design tips and best practices on developing Communities that are suited to your needs, attractive and engaging for your specific audiences.

The second speaker will be John Immerman who will tell us all about the Connections Advocacy Program

Last but not least, the event is open for all members of the community so if you have something to tell, give us a shout – we can arrange a short timeslot for you. We would also like to discuss our plans for the September conference in Madrid – do you still remember that we have got an amazing venue, huh? We need your feedback regarding your expectations and possibility of international travel.

Please register for the event HERE in order to receive the webinar link. The event is free!

We are looking forward to see you soon.

Maria, Wannes, Matteo, Martin and Jan

There are lots of initiatives to connect people who work with HCL Connections. But none targeted directly to super users of HCL Connections within organisations. Heitkamp & Thumann is using HCL Connections as their collaboration platform, and they have for a while been running a ‘guide’ (super user) program with good results.

From their experience with running this initiative we would like to explore what options there are to bring together their guides with guides, champions, super users from other programs. Maybe to just have someone sit in on one of their (virtual) meetings to have some exchange of thoughts or to talk about the challenges they run into when trying to get their colleagues to expand their usage of the platform and maybe just to exchange some tips & tricks. All ideas are open and welcome.

While most other initiatives might connect those at the top, the admins, organizers, community managers, architects, this initiative focuses directly on the people who uses HCL Connections most.  There are so many more who use the product and never go to conferences, virtual events etc. Not because they can’t, but because they think it’s not for them or too technical or just not in their job role. But many of them, and especially those that act as champions, super users, ambassadors or guides would really benefit from hearing how others are doing things.

So if you are a guide, internal HCL Connections champion, super user, ambassador for HCL Connections within your company (named as such or just because you do it) or run an adoption program and have them, or would simply like to start one; join us for the session where we try to come up with ways to set this up. The session is in English and open to all.

Date: 21st of January at 4pm CET

Meeting id is: https://ht-group.zoom.us/j/96572564480

Hi all and a happy New Year from the Let’sConnect team,

We sincerely wish you all the best for 2021 and we hope that this can be the year the world goes back to normal ( if it ever was).

We have some exciting announcements to make so let’s get started:

• First of all, we have secured a venue for our fall event and are keeping that booking for now in the hope that by the end of September we will be able to meet in person. The dates that are booked are
  27-28 September 2021!
  MadridObviously, these plans are subject to change and will largely depend on the pandemic situation and your willingness to travel
• Second of all, 2020 has learned us that virtual events are the thing and we did one successfully. So we want more!
  We will be holding a bi-monthly virtual meeting where we will invite speakers to talk to us about Connections and were we will have the opportunity to discuss amongst the participants.The schedule we are looking at would start in March (day to be decided)

  The goal is to have a mix of content. Adoption, Use cases, technical sessions, HCL sessions, ….. We are looking for content and speakers. So please contact us if you have an interesting topic to discuss. Reach out to your favorite Let’sConnect team member, mail us ( team@letsconnect.world), tweet @_lets_connect, ….

Let’s make it a great year together!!!!

Let’sConnect Virtual 2020 is over! The event was a real success and we are very happy for all the good feedback we have received from the attendees and speakers. It feels great that the community showed up, took part, asked questions and participated in polls from the speakers.

A real good feeling to see so many familiar names in the attendee list, and also so many new ones!

We are also pleased with the content that our speakers provided, we know it can be tough. Especially now in these times!

We have been working fast to get all presentations and replay videos published. Please also see our other blog posts where we share poll results, and the Q&A from the sessions.

Regarding the videos, please see the link to our Youtube channel below! And we are more than happy if you would share them amongst your colleagues and friends.

Keep the community vibrant, welcoming and alive! We look forward until we all can meet again.

The Let’sConnect Team

Let’sConnect Youtube Channel

 

As we promise during the event we have published the slides on our Speaker Deck page and we have also embedded it inside the Virtual Event agenda.

Enjoy !

Some more feedback from our virtual event earlier this week. We had a lot of questions from the audience ( thank you for your engaged participation) and we had most of them answered by our amazing HCL panelists. Posting a recap of them here.

Thank you so much for joining our event earlier this week. We ran some polls during the event and wanted to share the results with you.

Dear friends,

We hope that you all are safe and healthy.

As you all know, planning can at the moment be a bit tricky. So today we have some news for you. Good news! You will not only get one, but two Let’sConnect events!

First news is that we are downsizing our September event to focus on the latest updates from HCL. The new Product Manager Andrew Manby and his team will talk about the current Connections version and give you a sneak peak into the Connections 7 preview. We also have some customers lined up sharing their stories on how they use Connections.

Join us for our 2 day event on September 29 and 30 from 3 pm CEST until 5 pm CEST ( 9 am EST until 11 AM EST). This timing should alow for viewers to join from around the world.

See the agenda here

Register here

It is a great pleasure to announce an additional virtual Let’sConnect event that will take place in February 2021. Having this just after the Connections 7 release allows all of our speakers to cook up new content on usage, installation, business value and configuration of the new version. Stay tuned for updates on the exact date for this event.

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We hope you have all received the survey from the HCL product team on Connections. If not or if you have not yet had the time to take the survey, it will only take 5 minutes of your time. HCL is inquiring how your organization is using HCL Connections, this feedback will help them understand your use cases and will help guide future roadmap decisions.

Don’t miss your opportunity to co-create the future of HCL Connections with us!

And of course a reminder of our previous announcement that we have moved our physical event to 2021 in Madrid on September 27 and 28. We are super excited to see all of you in person again.

We hope to see you all soon!

Let’sConnect 2021 will be in Madrid!

If you want to reach us, contact us at team@letsconnect.world Or sign up to our newsletter

Bye for now!

The Let’sConnect team (Maria, Wannes, Matteo, Jan and Martin)

It seems like we only just turned the lights out and closed the shutters when winter arrives and it’s all systems go for planning the next Let’sConnect!

Inspired by the successful event in Munich in September we are very happy to announce the dates for our next event.

Save the dates 28-29 September 2020 for the conference in your calendar. Workshops will be held on 30 September.

Location is not yet set, but it will be in Europe and we aim to reveal the city within the next few weeks.

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Keep an eye out on this blog or sign up to our newsletter here

Yes, you are on the right website – The worldwide Social Connections user group “for IBM Connections and social business” decided to change its name. We are now LET’S CONNECT – we have a new logo, new twitter handle @_lets_connect and a new hashtag #LetsConnect but we are still the same group of people and a great community all around the world.

The announcement was made during the OGS of Social Connections 15 and we will gradually rebrand this site. Later we will also rebrand all social media accordingly.

Thank you for your never-ending support and we are looking forward for the next 15 conferences 😉

We will try to live stream tomorrow’s keynotes. Let’s hope the technology gods are with us. periscope.tv/soccnx#Letsconnect#soccnx