Heather Reeds and her team at Renovations are looking for a collaboration tool to help them leverage one another's expertise and work efficiently together. Find out how IBM Connections provided the solution to meet the team's needs.
| Heather Reeds and the Marketing team at Renovations are about to begin a long-term, large-scale project. |
| The team includes many external members who need to be able to share resources, track work items, and collaborate effectively with their colleagues working in different locations. |
| Team members also need to be able to find expertise among their colleagues and connect with each other. |
| But what application can they use to do all this? |
| As head of the Marketing team, Heather is tasked with finding a solution. |
| Heather does some research into social networking and collaboration tools for business and decides that IBM Connections provides the functionality her team needs. |
| IBM Connections is social computing software that enables users to share files, organize work, tap the expertise of others, set up online communities, work together on project documents, and much more. |
| Heather and her team get up and running with IBM Connections, and they are soon using the different applications to help them work smarter and better. |
| Heather and her team use the Activities application to set up and assign to-do items to one another. Team members are able to track their work items, mark them complete, and monitor upcoming project deadlines. Heather also uses Activities to organize team meetings, keep a record of meeting minutes, and share project resources with the rest of the team. |
| Heather sets up a team blog to keep a daily record of what the team is working on. By posting regular entries, Heather can keep the rest of the team up-to-date with how everything is progressing and share the latest news about project developments. |
| Heather and the rest of the team share web links to useful resources with one another using the Bookmarks application. As well as storing their own web links in a central space, team members can view their colleagues' bookmarks and find useful resources that way too. |
| Heather creates an online community so that the team has a central place to come together and share information. Team members start to post files to the community and participate in the discussion forum. Heather also sets up subcommunities to bring together smaller groups who are working on specific project tasks. |
| The team uses the Files application to organize project files and share them with one another. Team members upload updated versions of files and comment on each other's changes. The team can also recommend files that they find particularly useful to encourage other members to check them out. |
| Heather and her team brainstorm ideas in the community forum and share their past experiences of working on similar projects. Team members are able to post questions to the forum and get helpful answers from their colleagues. As forum owner, Heather makes it a practice to pin any important topics to the top of the forum so that team members are sure to see them. |
| One of the first tasks that Heather asks team members to complete is to fill out their profile in the Profiles application. By sharing details about their work experience and interests, team members are quickly able to find experts in particular areas and reach out to them for help on the project. The team members also update their status messages regularly to let colleagues know what they were working on and whether anything is blocking their progress. |
| Heather and the team use the community wiki to build up a central respository of information relating to the project. Team members are able to update pages as the project progresses to ensure that information is kept up-to-date. Individual members can follow pages they're particularly interested in to track the latest changes. Everyone agrees that the wiki is a valuable collaboration tool for their project team! |
| Heather's team make regular visits to the Home page to catch up on all the latest news stories and updates. The team are able to use the different filtering options to pinpoint the information they are most interested in. Some of the team members also customize their own Home page to create a working environment that suits them best. |
| Now that you've seen how Heather and the Renovations team are using IBM Connections to collaborate and work productively, find out more about how IBM Connections can help you and your team work towards your project goals! |