Tag Archive for: hcl

Congratulations to our team member Julian Mosen who has been recognised as HCL Ambassador in 2024!

The HCL Ambassadors program is a recognition program that showcases the best of the HCL community. Ambassadors go ‘above and beyond’ their normal job roles to help others, share information and organise events for the whole community to benefit from.

Also from our point of view, the title is a tribute to Julian’s many years of commitment, which he very much deserves.
Julian himself writes about it on LinkedIn:

“I am very proud and grateful to be recognised as an HCL Ambassador in 2024.
Looking back at the last few years, I have counted all the students that I introduced to software development using Domino, Connections, Leap and more recently Volt MX. It is an amazing number, almost 50 Computer Science students who have been trained in application development using HCL technologies and have worked very closely with me on various hands-on projects where we developed, tested or evaluated scientific approaches using one of HCL’s products. I am grateful for the support from HCL and the community through all the student projects, Bachelor’s and Master’s theses and student assistants that work with me. I am looking forward to all of the upcoming projects with the additional support of the HCL Ambassadors’ community.”

Also from our point of view, the title is a tribute to Julian’s many years of commitment, which he very much deserves.

Congratulations, Julian!

This year the 50th DACHNUG took place from June 13th to June 15th at the Rhein-Sieg-Forum in Siegburg, Germany. At this conference, users and providers of software related to HCL (the developer of HCL Connections and therefore also UniConnect) meet once a year. CEIR was present as part of the UCT project with a booth right next to the HCL booth. The booth was a big success and allowed us to have a series of very interesting conversations and ad hoc demonstrations of technology for interested participants.

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It is that time of the year again. December has arrived and, with it, the Christmas countdown has started. Much has changed in the world in the last years but some things stay the same. For the CEIR team at the University of Koblenz, the Domino Christmas Calendar App makes sure that the festive season is not forgotten.

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As mentioned in our blog post about the UniConnect update to HCL Connections version 7.0; not only did we update to Connections Version 7 but we also expanded our collaboration platform with the integration of various tools from Belsoft. The Belsoft Community Manager is already being used productively as new users of UniConnect are now being automatically added to the “UniConnect Community” when they register. This community is used to communciate important information to our users (e.g., planned maintenance work and updates). In the past, following registration to UniConnect users had to be manually added one by one to this community by our admins; this is now being handled automatically. Further, for over ten years, without extensive analysis of our databases we had no practical way to verify that everyone was (still) a member of this community. Thanks to the Belsoft Community Manager, we can now easily ensure that all users automatically become and stay members of the community and remain informed. In addition, the tool is saving a lot of time as invitations to join the community no longer have to be sent manually.

We thank our friends from Belsoft for their generous support. As soon as we have gained practical experience with the Belsoft Notifier, we will provide a further update. We believe the Belsoft Notifier will also help us improve our communication with users and improve knowledge sharing on UniConnect.

The need for digital alternatives for training and development workshops has increased due to digital transformation, advances in digital workplaces, and the increasing number of people working from home or in distributed teams. This demand proved to be even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical workshops were not possible, and digital solutions had to be found to provide remote access to business meetings as well as for delivering engaging and interactive workshops. Since working with a whiteboard is an essential part of most workshops and in the daily work of many employees, there is a need for a deeper investigation of visual collaboration tools that can be described as digital whiteboards. These tools offer graphical elements to visualise ideas and methods for facilitating collaborative work on a shared canvas or workspace enabling multiple collaborators to work together synchronously or asynchronously. This research is part of the DFG-funded project 2C-NOW (Collaboration and Coordination in Networks of Work) and the overarching CEIR research program. In the scope of 2C-NOW, the CEIR team is investigating transformations to work processes and practices in large-scale, heterogeneous enterprise collaboration platforms to obtain a deeper theoretical and practical understanding of how collaborative work takes place within the digital workplace in organisations.

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After a very long time of online video conferences and online meetings, we finally had the opportunity to attend a physical conference again! Petra SchubertSusan WilliamsSöhnke GramsMartin Just and Julian Mosen took the long way to Bruges in Belgium to attend the annual conference of the ENGAGE User Group. Theo Heselsmans, Chair of the ENGAGE User Group, invited participants to the brand-new Bruges Meeting & Convention Centre (BMCC) and prepared an impressive agenda with lots of great speakers from all over the world.

Our CEIR team was of course part of the great speakers and we presented two sessions: In the first session, Sue and Julian looked at the challenges of the long-term management of workspaces and collaborative content across their entire lifecycle from creation to destruction. How these challenges can be addressed, was shown with the help of an application we developed to support our team with the long-term management and persistent access to important online content. This application and a social bot called “Wiki Replicator” helps our team to keep track of wikis in HCL Connections. The session was concluded with a lively, interactive audience discussion about other participants experiences and their organisation’s requirements for support for the long-term management of digital workspaces and collaborative content.

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We are delighted to announce that HCL Technologies is the new partner for the University Competence Center for Collaboration Technologies (UCT). The UCT was funded for 10 years by IBM Germany and we are very grateful for the support that they gave us and for our fruitful collaboration with them over those 10 years. Special thanks go to Klaus Zimmermann and Ralf Bucksch of IBM Germany GmbH, for their commitment and support for the UCT and the tireless passion they gave to the collaboration.

The new contract with HCL Technologies was signed in March and commenced on April 1, 2020. We look forward to an equally long collaboration with HCL and to achieve further success. Several of our former IBM partners, including Tom Zeizel, Peter Schütt and Ingo Karge have joined HCL, so we have continuity and a shared history in the project. In the past few months we have also started work with new partners at HCL, among them Danielle Baptiste and André Hagemeier. We look forward to building the next stage of the UCT together with HCL.

“We have to evolve to avoid being disrupted” was the message Richard Jefts (General Manager at HCL Digital Solutions) delivered at the opening session of Engage 2020 – a two-day conference on collaboration technologies that took place in the Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem, Netherlands. Through 86 sessions more than 100 speakers and 400 attendees shared recent topics and insights into how to evolve collaboration in companies and how to leverage with the latest technologies and trends.

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You are invited to UCT ’s viewing party for the global launch announcing HCL’s first major releases for Domino v11, Notes v11, Sametime v11, and Connections 6.5. Come join us for this event featuring live demos, news, roadmaps, and technical sessions. We will be streaming the keynote live from Tokyo. Snacks will also be served.

Date: 4th December 2019
Time: 14:45
Location: University of Koblenz-Landau, Building A, Room A104

Sign up here: https://uct.de/en/contact/

We hope to see you at our viewing party!
Best, Your UCT team

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Social Connections is the international user group for HCL Connections and is the place-to-be to discuss topics such as the future of work, social collaboration and enterprise social networks. This year sees the 15th Social Connections, which is taking place in Munich this time.

It is also the first important meeting of this user group after HCL became the official owner of the former IBM Collaboration portfolio. We are looking forward to hearing the official announcements and presentations that were postponed over the last weeks and months during the takeover. This includes information about how HCL plans to support Universities in terms of (cost-free) academic software licences and especially the continuation of the University Competence Center for Collaboration Technology (UCT). Does HCL want us to continue our research projects on UniConnect, such as IndustryConnect and our many Domino student projects? Do they want us to keep putting our resources into the complex hosting activities required to provide access to their collaboration product portfolio for other universities?  We will meet and inform everyone as soon as we know more.

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