1. © 2014 IBM Corporation
CUST118: Major League
Baseball: Fostering a
Collaborative Approach to
Conduct Baseball Business.
Peter Murphy, Major League Baseball
Smriti Kapuria, Prolifics

2. Who We Are
 Peter Murphy
– Project Manager, Major League Baseball, Commissioner's Office
– Project Management, Collaborative solutions
– peter.murphy@mlb.com
 Smriti Kapuria
– Technology Manager, Prolifics User Experience Practice
– UX designer, Developer, Architect, Ceramicist
– skapuria@prolifics.com
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3. Agenda
 About MLB Commissioner’s office
 Collaboration Needs of business groups
 Adoption of IBM Connections as a social platform
 MLB’s own solution : Customize and extend IBM Connections
 Key Components of solution architecture
 Interesting features and challenges
 The road ahead..
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4. About MLB Commissioner’s office
 What is MLB ?
• Baseball Office of the Commissioner(BOC)
• Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM)
• MLB Network
 Business of Baseball - About the Commissioner's office
– Game Regulations
– Player Contracts
– Corporate Sponsorships
 Role of MLB IT group at the Commissioner’s office
– Diverse Group
– Supports BOC and clubs
– Wide Spectrum of services – security, collaboration, application development
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5. 5
MLB Commissioner’s Office
Collaboration Needs of Business Groups

6. Business Groups
And the way they conduct their business
 Introduction to a few different business groups
– Department Based – Finance, Ticketing, IT, Legal
• Social Collaboration
– Event Based – Industry Meetings, World Series
• Content sharing
– Baseball Function Based – Official Scorers, Umpires
• Social Collaboration, Content sharing
– Program Based – RBI, Urban Youth Academy
• Process Management
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7. Collaboration Needs of Business Groups
Basic Ideas of structure and information sharing
 Business groups are structured for information sharing and collaboration
– with in each group as a community
– with external entities
• Clubs
• Vendors
• Sponsors, etc.
 Different types of social needs
– Facilitate collaboration between clubs
– Provide centralized information to conduct business
– Periodic Notification of content and information
– Expose dynamic and historic ticketing data from several systems
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8. 8
Adoption of IBM Connections
As a Social Collaboration platform

9. Social Collaboration Eco-system
 The solution is implemented as multiple restricted communities
 Each with its own unique user group
 Users interface with Connection features within their community
– Wikis
– Files
– Blogs
– Activities, etc.
 Each community has a set of owners that administer their community
 Connections administrators
– Moderate content
– Use Metrics for reporting
– Create communities
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10. Communities, Users and Functions
and it all comes together!
 Each business group uses their Community as a collaboration platform
 Community is the hub for information and resources to run their business effectively
 Functions such as blogs, calendar and forums facilitate communication
 Community wikis, blogs, files provides centralized access for business artifacts
 Community members set-up preferences to receive emailed notifications of updates
 Sub Communities are created for sub groups of users for targeting content and
communication
– One example is executives of a business group are members of a sub-community
– In some cases, regional users/groups also have their own sub-communities
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11. Platform Snapshot
Here’s how it looks! – The Official Scorers Community
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12. Platform Snapshot
BOC – IT Project Management Office
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13. Platform Snapshot
MLB – Collaborative Solutions (Subcommunities)
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14. MLB’s own solution
Customize and extend IBM Connections
 How we got to creating custom widgets on IBM Connections?
 Custom Widgets, Custom community themes..
 Several communities created custom community widgets in addition to out-of-the-box
 Some examples are Polls, File Viewer, Ticketing widgets
 Communities expose dynamic aggregated data from different systems through such widgets
 An interesting scenario of Workflow Management with IBM Connections
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15. MLB’s own solution
Job Request and Workflow Management with IBM Connections
 This solutions utilizes Community Activities in IBM Connections to track job requests
 New requests are created with a third party tool
 Approved requests are added as an activity in IBM Connections using Connections API
 Community Owners can quickly view and assign incoming job requests to members
 3 custom widgets are created to set-up the Workflow Management dashboard
– view new job requests
– view schedules of members
– view upcoming due dates of tasks
 All of these widgets use Community Activities Connections API to maintain a cohesive
solution
 A mobile view for each of this functions is also provided
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16. MLB’s own solution
Job Request and Workflow Management Snapshot
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17. 17
Let’s Talk IT
IBM Connections, user management and databases

18. Solution Architecture
 Current implementation of IBM Connections uses a medium topology
 The environment is configured for high availability
 User management scenarios
– A TDI script is used for onboarding users in Connections via LDAP
– The user is synchronized with the LDAP and Portal implementations
 Cognos is configured to run with IBM Connections to provide metrics and reporting
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19. Interesting Features and Challenges
 Notifications
– a fine balance between voluntary socialization and business needs of information
sharing
 Are Community members following the right content?
– For notifications and preferences!
 Dynamic user base
– Clubs and user’s name change frequently that needs to be maintained regularly
 Challenges with content moderation
 Files and tagging as information sharing is an important need
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20. Business Benefits
 Better communication
– Between the central office and the clubs
– Between clubs themselves
– Between various support staff such as official scorers
 Better notifications
– Community members are better informed about new content and changes to existing
content. No longer need to hunt and peck for latest content.
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21. The road ahead..
 Newly deployed Connections 4.5 environment
 Connections Content Manager evolution
 Enterprise document manager consideration
 Forms features(survey, polls etc.) through Feature pack
 Happy Marriage between Connections and Portal
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22.  Access Connect Online to complete your session surveys using any:
– Web or mobile browser
– Connect Online kiosk onsite
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23. 23
Acknowledgements and Disclaimers
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