CEIR Team from left to right: Julian Mosen, Petra Schubert, Susan P. Williams, Martin Just, Sebastian Bahles
Picture: Matteo Cogliati

This year, the CEIR team once again took part in the annual ENGAGE User Group conference and provided insights into their current research projects.

Theo Heselmans invited us to participate and this was his last event as the Chair of the ENGAGE User Group before handing over the Chairperson role to his two successors. The conference location was “Handelsbeurs”, the historic stock exchange in Antwerp, Belgium, an impressive venue that attracted even more conference participants than in previous years. The conference venue not only offered the perfect environment for exchanging ideas and for networking, but also provided the setting for first-class presentations. The CEIR team prepared two sessions for the conference.

In our first session, Susan P. Williams and Julian Mosen showed how HCL Domino and HCL Volt MX are used to extract and visualise the content and storage locations of distributed digital workspaces based on our research on “Social Documents”. Chat messages, e-mails, wiki pages and files are just a few examples of the social content that is created in a project, however, these documents are usually not stored in the same system and often lack information about their relationship to the project or to each other. To investigate this problem we built a HCL Volt MX application that makes use of graph-based representations and reveals the complexity of a typical workspace, where related documents are not stored centrally in one place but are located across different collaborative applications and systems, such as HCL Connections, Notes/Domino and Microsoft Teams.

In our second session, Petra Schubert, Martin Just and Wannes Rams (ISW) demonstrated how you can use Domino to build a harmonised data warehouse for digital traces and to visualise user activity in simple Power BI Dashboards. They showcased trace data from HCL Connections and Huddo Boards, however, the dashboard also works for all kinds of other software, such as HCL DX, Microsoft 365, Atlassian Confluence/Jira etc.

In the session questions such as:

  • What functionality are people using for doing what?
  • What kind of workspaces are forming?
  • What are the characteristics of these spaces?
  • Who is working with whom?
  • What kind of content is being created?
  • How connected are people?

were addressed and answered with concrete examples from our own HCL Connections platform.

The slides for both sessions are available for download at the conference website:

Session 1: Where is the Social Content? Volt MX and Domino make visible what employees should see!
https://engage.ug/engage2.nsf/Pages/session2024?Open&Sp=Susan

Session 2: Using Domino as your harmonised data warehouse for trace analytics
https://engage.ug/Engage2.nsf/Pages/session2024?Open&Sp=Petra

Pictures: Matteo Cogliati