With so many solutions touting social capabilities out there and being used for different situations it can be daunting to decide on when to use what and why. Your organization might already have Salesforce, IBM Connections, Sharepoint and solutions like Jira that offer social capabilities but how do you get all these worlds together? The last thing you want after all is to have one department ‘being social’ in one platform and another somewhere else. That completely undermines the whole aspect of cross company collaboration….

Social Islands

but there might be good reasons why they need to use those different platforms. Your sales departments might live and breath in Salesforce and need that direct connection between their Chatter posts and the accounts they pertain to and your developers might scream bloody murder if you take away their JIRA wall. But what if Salesforce and JIRA aren’t being used in the rest of your organization and other solutions are required or used there? Like IBM Connections. How do you prevent a ‘social island’ culture in your collaboration landscape?

There are several solutions and integration options out there that address the problem of ‘social islands’ and offer integration for a large number of platforms like JIRA, BOX, SharePoint and even Salesforce already. Mostly orientated on pulling information from these platforms into the IBM connections environment or integrating specific parts of IBM Connections into them. But when it comes to integrating IBM connections into the Salesforce environment or two way integration there really was still a lot to win. This is changing as QKOM has been working hard on creating a solution that will allow for deep and seamless integration of Salesforce and IBM Connections.

By allowing the user to connect through OAUTH to use, create, search and post directly and effortlessly from within Salesforce to IBM Connections communities, files, activities and update streams – Salesforce users will be able to collaborate and work in both systems at the same time without having to leave their environment. Keeping other organizational users (or even external partners!) who might not have access to all the info in the Salesforce environment up to date of developments and statuses and utilizing the many great options each system offers. This will save your organization on potentially expensive licenses and allow for a connected yet still also secure and specialized collaborative landscape.

I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with QKOM on this topic discussing further use cases and functional requirements and am excited to see more bridges between the Salesforce & IBM Connections worlds being build. After all, it’s all about finding ways to collaborate!

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Please see the following clip for a first glance of what is possible but keep in mind that there is more to come very soon so stay tuned