Which app do I use?

Choose the IBM® Connections app that best suits the task that you want to accomplish.

IBM Connections is a suite of apps that is designed to help people in an organization to collaborate. Depending on which apps that are deployed for your organization, you can work with the following IBM Connections apps:

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 app. You can keep bookmarks private or share them with everyone.

Note: Groups must be enabled for your organization.

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 apps, such as Activities, Wikis, or Forums, to enable the community members to work together and share content.

Note: Groups must be enabled for your organization.

Files

Use the Files app 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 app 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 IBM Connections apps 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 apps.

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.