Profiles overview

Connect with people that you need to collaborate with and add them to your network so that you can build up a set of useful contacts. Increase your visibility by updating your profile with information to help people learn about you and your skills.

Increase your visibility

Tap into the collective knowledge of the people in your organization. By filling out your profile with rich social information, such as your interests, hobbies, and tags that indicate your area of expertise, you can help people get to know you better. If people know who you are, what you do, what projects you work on, which tools and technologies you use, and the problems that you are trying to solve, then they can connect with you in a meaningful way.

Connect with people

Scan the Recent Updates section of a person's profile to see a summary of their latest updates and updates of contacts whom they follow. The profile owner and other people can post comments in response to any update entries or messages. Posting a message in a person's Recent Updates section is one way to communicate with that person. Status updates for contacts that the profile owner follows also appear in this area, enabling the profile owner and others to increase their awareness of what network contacts and community members are doing and saying.
Note: Administrators can disable certain features in Recent Updates. For example, they can configure settings to control who can post messages so that only the people in a user's network can post comments to that user's message board.

Follow someone so that you can see their updates, such as posting a profile status message, adding a blog post, or commenting on or recommending something. These events are listed in the All Updates view of your Home page.

Search profiles to find people by their contact information or by searching on their interests, experience, and work projects. The search control is available on every page. You can also open the Directory tab to search for people in your organization. For a more targeted directory search, use Display full search options on the Directory tab to search for data in specific fields.

New employees must be added to the Profiles application by the IBM® Connections administrator. Only people who are listed in the corporate directory are available in Profiles.

Build your own network

Use profiles to make useful connections. Find people with the skills and expertise you need and add them to your network. Follow people when you want to keep up with their updates but don't want to add them to your network. You can view the latest status updates from the people that you are following and the people in your network by logging in to the Home page and selecting Status Updates on the Updates tab.

Become involved

Discover who in the organization is working on projects like yours or finding solutions to similar problems, and what resources they are using to simplify their jobs. Find out who your co-workers are, what their interests are, what skills they have, what they are publishing or reading, and get in touch with them. See who they connect to so that you can extend your network further.