Updating your profile

- Like many social networks, having a user profile that is accurate and up-to-date is very important. Most, if not all of the work you will be doing with IBM Connections will involve working with other people, some of them you may know and some of them you may not. Now imagine trying to find other people in your company who may have expertise in a particular area. It's not an easy task but with a carefully crafted IBM Connections profile, people will be able to find you and you find them.

Like your résumé, your profile should tell others all about you. What you do at your company, your contact information and even a photo or avatar which is a professional picture of yourself. Your avatar will appear next to everything you do in Connections. This is where profiles come in to play within IBM Connections. So, let's dive in and create Gail's profile. There are two places you can access your profile.

The first is under "People" and under "My Profile". The other is over here on the right side, "My Profile". So, I'll just click "My Profile" and now I can see Gail's profile. It's blank. To start editing your profile, click on the "Edit my profile" button. So let's start by changing Gail's avatar from this blank head here to her professional photo. I clicked on "Change", I'm going to choose "File", I am gonna select Gail's photo that I've stored on my desktop.

I'm gonna select "Choose" and then "Upload". And now you can see Gail's photo here on the left hand side. This photo is gonna appear everywhere within IBM Connections. Now there are other things in Gail's profile that need to be filled out. The first are tags and tags are words used to describe a person. Now, with Gail she can choose whether or not she wants to have tags added to her profile by others.

So if she selects yes, then other people inside of IBM Connections will be able to tag her profile. If she selects no, others will not be able to. Next is contact Information, this is where you can fill out your job title, your country, your telephone number, your physical address, your website and other things. So I'm gonna fill out Gail's profile now. Now that we filled out Gail's contact information, it's time to fill out the "About Me" section.

This is where you're gonna tell other people what you do in your job at your company and I'm going to add Gail's information right here. Now that I've completed editing Gail's profile, I'm gonna hit "Save Changes". You'll note that IBM Connections has told you that the changes have been made but may take a little while to get updated. On the left hand side you're gonna see tags here and Gail currently has no tags so I'm gonna enter a tag because Gail is an expert in IBM Connections.

So, I'm gonna enter "IBM Connections expert" and then I'm gonna hit the plus key and now I've added that tag to Gail. So when other people view Gail's profile they'll be able to see that she's an IBM Connections expert. If I wanna remove a tag, I click on the little X here and that will remove the tag from Gail's profile. In the middle section here you can see recent updates made by Gail. In fact, look right here you can see that Gail recorded a status update which we'll talk about in another video and you can see that she updated her profile.

You can see the tab here for contact information which contains the information we just updated as well as the "About Me" information that we entered earlier for Gail.