Choose the IBM® Connections
application that best suits the task that you want to accomplish.
IBM Connections is a suite
of applications that are designed to help people in an organization
to collaborate. Depending on the applications that are deployed for
your organization, you can work with the following IBM Connections applications:
- Activities
- Use Activities to plan and track work items and documents that
are related to a project or task. Activities are best suited for a
targeted task, such as planning an event or tracking deliverables
for a product release. When the project is complete, you can close
the activity and place it in an inactive state. If you have a larger
project that involves collaborating on documents, use a wiki.
- Blogs
- Announce information about a particular subject and receive feedback.
Blogs generally have a single author or few authors. For a broader
exchange of ideas, use a forum.
- Bookmarks
- Create shortcuts to web pages of interest to you and others. To
share bookmarks with a specific group of people, add bookmarks to
a community with a defined membership. Otherwise, add bookmarks to
the Bookmarks application. You can keep bookmarks private or share
them with everyone.
- Communities
- Use a Community to share a collection of information with a group.
Although communities can be public, they are often used to share information
with a specified group of members. For example, you might create a
community for the sales team. Within the community you might provide
collaborative applications, such as Activities, Wikis, or Forums,
to enable the community members to work together and share content.
- Files
- Use the Files application as a repository for storing and sharing
files. Upload a file to Files instead of attaching a file to an email.
You can link to a file from many places without storing multiple copies
of the file. In addition, users with access to the file can revise
the file and any changes are immediately available to other users.
If you want a defined group of people to have access to a file, use
the Files application from within a community.
- Forums
- Use a forum to have an open discussion where users can create
topics and responses about subjects of common interests. Forums provide
a convenient format for question and answer discussions, including
support forums. If you want to limit access to the forum to a defined
group of users, create a forum within a community.
- Home page
- Use the Home page when you want to view the latest updates from
all in IBM Connections applications
in one place. You can filter the display to include only information
that interests you most. You can like updates, repost updates, and
comment on them. Depending on your deployment, you might also be able
to include updates from third-party applications.
- Wikis
- Wikis are ideal for storing large numbers of documents. Depending
on their access privileges, users can view or revise topics that are
stored in a wiki. A wiki that you create within a community is available
only to members of that community. If you are managing only a few
documents, or if you want to track to-do items, an Activity might
be a better choice than a wiki.