Project Dragonfly takes to the air

Today we're kicking off a new project here at Teamstudio, Project Dragonfly, with its own community on Lotus Greenhouse.

Dragonfly is an offline mobile client for IBM Connections including your most-requested features and built by Teamstudio on the Unplugged offline business engine.

Many users of IBM Connections (ourselves included) have asked for an offline Connections app for their mobile devices.  We want to be able to upload a photo to Connections, download and store Profiles, take recent Communities or Activities content offline, or download our most important and frequently accessed Files.   This community is for all iPad, iPhone or Android users who'd like to see a product like this in the iTunes App Store or in the Google Play store.  Here at Teamstudio we've already got a mobile offline engine, called Unplugged, which can sync with Domino servers using DXL and with back ends that offer suitable Web feeds (Atom, SOAP, REST).  Our Unplugged XPages-based programmable engine gives us the capability to build a fully-featured offline Connections app and - once launched - respond quickly to users' enhancement requests.   Our project deadlines are October 2012 for the first prototype and January 2013 for the shipping product (iOS first, Android later).

Why did we call it Dragonfly? 
Unplugged Dragonfly, like the world's fastest flying insect - has two sets of wings.  One syncs to Lotus Domino servers, the other to IBM Connections servers, all in the same insect...


Here's our starter list of requirements from conversations with IBM Connections users:

 
1. Upload a picture from your phone or tablet, with a contextual comment.
2. Download selected Profiles, save data subset to your local Contacts app on your phone.
3. Tag anything in your downloaded content set
4. Update Activities and view Activities
5. View and post status updates (sync when back online)
6. Download a selected set of Files
7. Post a Blog entry
8. Specify your default downloaded content set (by Communities, by Activities, by Connections)
9. Search for anything in your downloaded content set
10. Security: downloaded content set to be stored in encrypted data format
11. Overall user experience should be simpler/easier than current mobile Connections client

What do you think? Visit our new Community forum where you can vote on which of these makes its way into the product, or feed in your own top requirements.