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It's IdoNotes Episode number 125. A review of the lotus connections
client for iOS. this is brought to you by Instant Technologies and Instant
Integrity Archives. Look them up at Instant dash tech dot com
welcome everybody it's another IdoNotes episode. This time episode 1
25 we take a look at the new connections client
uh... for the iPad, iPhone iWhatever iOS is what it is. They updated it a
little bit
and we are going to take a look live at the screen in just a second. But I want to tell you
you do have to be connected
there's no offline mode per se that i saw involved with it anywhere
in the settings.
The number of accounts you'll see in a minute is kinda limited which is
surprising with the number of silos we've talked about before and the number
of connections communities you may be part of.
So we will take a look at that. Well let's get over to the demo
and take a look exactly what goes into it and walk through some of the hit
or misses inside of it. As well as what i can do for you here. So i will bring up the
screen real quick for you.
As you see will click on the icon.
We will bring that up.
Easy enough it's going to ask you (and I will focus for you)
It's going to ask you what you want to connect to we're gonna get a couple
choices here.
You're gonna get
your company server and Greenhouse. So we are going to go to Greenhouse to make life easy.
Pretty easy to see. I'll type in my username and password for Greenhouse.
It will bring up the normal prompt for the keyboard no difference there.
As it loads up there you go.
Welcome to Connections. So we're in now. They have an actual welcome splash which
is pretty cool it'll do a little demo for you.
Now you're able to swipe through everything or show you a little bit
about what you can do. The communities..
How you slide the screens left and right to do certain actions on top of them.
Kind of cool, how about your contacts. So they give you good little demo which is nice
to see. A lot of times they throw you into the app you're not sure what's going
on.
Things like updates and things like that.
It also tells you about
couple settings you have in there and adding new accounts which will talk
about in a few minutes what you do with those.
It says tap below and we are ready to go.
Now we're into the interface.
We will move around a minute in the screen but as you can see down the left sides navigation.
Right there in the middle is pretty much the status updates.
It's not a lot you can do. I brought my own accounts you can see.
We'lll zoom down.
So you can switch or add accounts. The funny part was
you can see my existing account here,
I want to add again it's the same screen.
So it's your home server,
and it's Greenhouse. That's it.
Not too exciting there!
So let's go back and go through the UI, I'm kinda disappointed there's not more
accounts that are located in there.
There's nothing we can really do about it though at this point in time.
So you see the status updates that are there.
You can scroll through its very responsive it's also cached that pretty much
pulling that down from the web.
You see the navigation. So we click on things like add a comment.
Very small tiny box!
Kinda hard to click on to get to go. Once you do
you can type inside of it.
No big deal, cancel out.
Just tiny to get to. A little surprised it was a lil bit bigger or a little more
ability work with.
Everything else you can sit there and tap away.
uh... and guess what?
there is really nothing out you can do.
You can tap all you want.
um... there's no other action. So we're going to go to profiles. We'll take a look through profiles.
It's going to bring up by default
your own network.
As you can see once again you can jump by letter if you want to uh... pretty
easy get through scroll through everybody that's in there
so you have the option to go through.
Now i was curious as when i started working with some of these besides their
titles. It's what they put in. There's no pictures.
So there they come. It took a minute to cache i thought at first we were going to have
any. It took a moment to get in there so once they are there you are ready go.
We'll choose one.
I was surprised at all the white space
that you see.
A huge surprise to see all the white space. I'm not seeing any a status updates. I thought maybe it's
just that person.
what are my options? Well i could share 'em.
I could try refresh, let me try refresh. Nothing!
So i said well maybe it's the person so let me try somebody else.
So i grabbed another one and slid it over.
The same thing and i probaly could have done this a few times until I found somebody that worked. I'm
guessing that area should have something in it but i did find anybody else.
So you can also choose our people you follow. You can go through network
invitations.
Now this is another one of the network imitations issue bring up a list of
people who want to add you. Okay i see a few let's click one and see what
information I get on 'em.
I get pretty much what you saw on the profile
with other limited information. Once again all the white space. I can't
believe there's nothing else involved in but it's possible. But we'll accept and see what
happens
Does it go away?
No it drops them.
So as you can see on the left it drops them. As I click accept. It leaves the one open that
I had.
So we'll go ahead and get out of those. I will look at anything else. You can look at your
own profile that's in there.
Once again
and not too much there. My profile has more than that i had a blog there. I had other
things and I can't get that to go away. so you have to change views. So these are
the community views there's a lot more inside of these.
As you can see it on a communities are out there. It's gonna show you the ones you are
part of first.
It always goes to your own. Which is good it's a good start to have my own.
We'll take a look at the Lotusphere community.
Inside of that now you can see there's some updates
that are in there.
You can leave the community as an action which was one thing that you do.
There is really not much else there.
we are going to change communities real quick to one that has more information inside of it . We'll take a
look. Now look you can see files. You can see a few other things going on. There's one with some
text.
So we'll keep clicking it.
And we'll click it!
And what I was hoping was I'd be able to do something with it.
Tapped away.
I couldn't do anything!
I was away would open it or do something.
I get the guys business card, no picture which is nice.
But i couldn't do anything with it
and i was really anxious to do something with it so uh... i kept clicking on
people and getting the business card
no picture the person but i could go to their profile and see
They make it difficult. Things i want to do. I was hoping for since I saw arrows on
the sides.
A little more actions there wasn't anything I could do with those either. You're really kinda stuck
with
and update of what they've done but no action
Like change the topic so you can see a little more information that's inside
of a topic which is nice. You can reply there
No big deal.
So we'll jump back to communities. You see the updates are there.
i was really hoping
for some more. So we'll go through our community and you can see is all that
everything's going to go to files now.
Now i can click on a file
Andi can actually open one up
and i can see the text.
i would hope that that was linked from the other page but it wasn't.
No big deal it's what you've got. From there you can download it, you can
do things with it. You can follow it. You can do all the fun stuff.
Activities
Once again you start with my activities.
Really good to see
You're hoping for more information out of it. You can click it'll slide it over
to give you what's inside.
from there you can actually work with it. So you can actually do some other
activities with it i'm sorry actions with it.
You can see the sections, to do's.
You can actually go in and see who's the members of the activity itself.
It will let you know who the members are which is nice to see.
You can actually change the priority. medium-high
Not much else you can do.
So good to know
We'll get out of there and let's jump over to blogs.
Blog is your blogs.
I don't know if it's ones you follow or ones you're part of. I couldn't figure out my blogs
it would just be my blog but i can see there wasn't.
You can see the posts that are there.
We'll select uh... collaboration solutions had a more recent update. The
one i chose before was like 2008.
So there's a bunch more post sthat you can see.
Not bad.
You can see the
the uh... blog voting that they have on there which is interesting
that they have it on there.
Bookmarks or what you'd expect. Your own bookmarks as well as public and
private.
Hit the drop down you can see there's public bookmarks
There's a lot of stuff in there.
So i can see how this would be a little bit work which need to do. There is a ton of
them that are in there. But it's good to see so the bookmarks accessible. Files.
I didn't have any files.
Go figure.
I didn't even mess around with files anymore.
Forums
There's a lot of forms that are out there. Public forums, ones you follow and ones
you own. Or you can work with those
you can actually get into the forums themselves.
As you can see
it's good to flash through both with this amountt of data it could be
hugely overwhelming for a person.
And then lastly wikis.
I was curious about wikis and what you can do with them. So i selected one
of the wikis and i chose the Lotusphere one. So brings up the page. I want you
know as the top of the screen it shows you what wiki you're on and everything. But as
you scroll it goes away. You see the whole page but you lose
uh... navigation manageability. When you do it I'd expect that to work with it.
To kind of move around that's on there.
So once I got it back I said well I wonder what you can see about the page.
So I scrolled back.
Once you get it back
you can actually then see
you can open it
as a whole. You can copy it.
which was good to know. But when I opened it then I was able to open a drop down
which didn't make sense.
uh... So i said what about it. When was it changed? When was it updated? Things
like that. So I clicked about.
It took a second.
Once i saw the about,
I could see when it was updated. How many page views it's had. How big it is, everything else.
So the wiki one is very difficult to work with. I don't see that one being a
big piece. It was hard to navigate. It was hard to move with.
Clicking the page button gave a weird submenu inside of it. I couldn't tell
what was going on with it.
So that's pretty much the majority of the client itself. As you can see
there's a lot of work that needs to be done
in some of the other parts. Let's look on the bottom left. There is an action menu I saw.
Sorry for the light a little bit of a glare. But I clicked it
and it's where I do a status update.
I can upload a photo or do a blog post. Which is nice but is way down the left
and not up in the side menu.
We'll zoom up and it brought up the ability to status updates. You can type
that's just what it is it's very simple.
Once again i was surprised
that it was all the way down in the far left corner.
If it was simple to do it which open the streams and everything else.
But i expect to be higher in the menu options or maybe at the top.
uh... somewhere else that I'd be navigating to more mainly because i have updates up
there. Something near they would say my updates would make the most sense.
That's what i would think inside of it.
Then again,
I could be horribly wrong.
It's a very good possibility.
Overall,
it was responsive like I said
uh... you do have to be connected.
So keep aware that as you go that being connected is a major part of working
with this interface in working with the UI.
Only allowing two accounts I think is a kind of restrictive i expect more
communities to be involved.
And I may want to connect to to more accounts overall.
So I'd wanna have
you know, four five possibly depending on customers depending on what about the
IBM DeveloperWorks. Then we have BleedYellow and then we have Greenhouse.
and we have the others.
So I expect there'd be a little bit more there.
Your own company have an internal and external.
It's possible, but i doubt it, but it's possible. The idea would be
if it says add accounts I would think I could add more.
I didn't find it in the preferences.
I didn't find it in the actual
preferences for
the iPad itself. I went in there and saw Connections as an app.
But there was nothing i could do with it there. So overall
pretty responsive
uh... great UI enhancements. Good changes they have from it.
A few more things we could hope for the future but everyone if you don't have it
now.
Go and and get it, it's free in the app store.
Download it, install, connect up and find me on the Greenhouse [music to end]