The Red Cross Launches their Social Network with Lotus Connections

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Today, the Spanish Red Cross announced their go live of World Red Cross (Mundo Cruz Roja in spanish), their social networking site powered by Lotus Connections.

The Red Cross is all about communities helping communities. As such, they felt that a social networking solution would be appropriate for them. After comparing with various vendors, they picked IBM's solution and went live today. The idea is that each community will serve different purposes, but they all have one thing in common: the need to share information amongst its members.

I like how they even created a community so their members can support each other as they learn to use this new social networking site. I think this is a great idea because that way you can reduce your IT and Help Desk support costs. The site has been enabled in 26 languages so pretty much anybody in the world can use it.

Go check it out: http://www.mundocruzroja.org

LinkedIn widget for Lotus Connections

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On Thursday, one of my favorite Lotus Connections developers, Ronny Pena, released the new IBM Lotus Connections widget interface to LinkedIn. The widget, which has been available in MyDeveloperWorks for some time, allows users to enhance their Lotus Connections Profile with information from LinkedIn. To the right, you can see a screenshot of how the widget looks inside my profile in MyDeveloperWorks.

Now along with their Lotus Connections Profile contact information, report to chain, and details provided in the About Me section, Profiles can be used to share and discover data from the LinkedIn network such as education, honors and awards, and work experiences. The widget can be easily added to your Lotus Connections Profile and gives each user control about how much they would like to share from LinkedIn.

Lotus Widget Catalog that was announced at Lotusphere last month. The direct link for the widget is here.

Here's what the widget can do:

• The iWidget allows you to view another user's current work experience, education, number of recommendations, as well as a link to the user's LinkedIn profile in the LinkedIn Web site.

• The iWidget fetches LinkedIn profile data using the LinkedIn authentication protocol.

• Users are prompted to authenticate with LinkedIn if they are first time users of the widget.

• Users can specify what LinkedIn profile data they want to surface in their Lotus Connections Profile via the edit dialog of the iWidget.

• Links to a user's LinkedIn profile into the Lotus Connections profile of that user.

• Supports 24 languages and bi-direction

Enjoy!

Easily Search Lotus Connections from Google Chrome

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Lately, I've been using Google Chrome as my default browser to see if I can get used to it. I always considered myself very productive using Firefox, and I've heard so many good things about Chrome that I decided to give it a try. The features that I relied the most on Firefox were the Firebug plugin and searching Lotus Connections directly from the browser. Searching Lotus Connections directly from Firefox was possible thanks to OpenSearch which Lotus Connections supports since v2.5.

Google Chrome comes with a Firebug-like capability already built-in so that was easy. My next priority was setting up Chrome to search Lotus Connections instead of Google ( we all know at this point that Connections is a better search engine than Google, right?). Everywhere I looked, it said that Chrome supports OpenSearch. I couldn't, however, figure out how to add Lotus Connections to Chrome via OpenSearch.

Luckily, there's a way to do it manually (this is how I did it in my Mac. It may be a bit different in Windows):

1. Open Chrome
2. Go to Preferences...
3. Under Basics, you'll see Default Search set to Google. Click on Manage
4. Click on the + sign to add a new search engine
5. Set the Name to Lotus Connections, the Keyword to lc and the URL to https://<hostname>/search/web/search?query=%s (for example: https://w3.ibm.com/connections/search/web/search?query=%s). It should look like this:
   
   
   
   
6. Click Ok
   
7. Optional: Select it and click on Make Default
8. Close the Preferences panel.
   

If you didn't set Lotus Connections as your default search engine, here's what you do. Say you want to search for "enterprise2.0 software". In Chrome's omnibox, type "lc enterprise2.0 software" (w/out the quotes) and press Enter. And voilá, you've now searched Lotus Connections directly from the browser without needing to open Connections first and logging in.

Enjoy!

Lotus Connections Status Updates comes to Microsoft Sharepoint

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I'm currently preparing for a demo of Lotus Connections for a customer who uses Microsoft Sharepoint heavily. One of their requests is that they want to be able to access Lotus Connections data directly from Sharepoint so that users don't have to jump back and forth between the two applications. By now, you've probably seen my demo of the out of the box integration capabilities between Lotus Connections and Microsoft Sharepoint.

To add to that, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could bring Lotus Connections' microblogging capability to Sharepoint. Since Sharepoint has a web part that renders feeds, the first attempt was to use that web part and point it to the feed of status messages from Lotus Connections. While that was nice, it didn't look pretty at all!

Luckily, the web part allows you to customize the XSL so that the output looks nicer. (XSL defines the way to transform XML into HTML). So I took the original XSL and replaced it with a new one.

For the techies out there, you can download both and compare them. You'll see that I basically changed about 10-15 lines in the original file. For those that already own a Sharepoint site, go ahead and add the RSS web part (which has a bad name cause the web part can handle RSS, Atom, iTunes feeds, and other..), put in this new XSL, point it to the feed of status updates from Lotus Connections, and voilá.

There you have it! Now you can see the team's Lotus Connections status updates in Microsoft Sharepoint in less than 5 minutes.

Enjoy!

Bookmark simultaneously to Lotus Connections and del.icio.us

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Earlier today I received a ping from one of my favorite customers. He showed QuixApp a nice bookmarklet that basically lets you do whatever you want. He thought this would be a good idea, for example, to create a bookmarklet that would simultaneously bookmark a page both in Lotus Connections and in del.icio.us.

I immediately answered that this has been available for a while, internally at IBM. The following bookmarklet was created by Sacha Chua and if you are browsing an internal page (e.g. w3.ibm.com/....) then the page is only bookmarked in Lotus Connections. If you are browsing an extranet site (e.g. www.cnn.com... ) then the page will be tagged in both services (you don't want internal/confidential pages to be accidentally saved to del.icio.us, right?).

Before you can use it with your own Lotus Connections deployment, you'll have to customize it a bit. Once you look at the code, you'll see something like this:

if(!location.href.match('.ibm.com'))

The first step is to change that from .ibm.com to whatever your company's hostname is. Next, you'll want to change the Lotus Connections URL. In the code you'll see something like this:

var%20h='http://w3.ibm.com/connections/dogear';

Again, change that to match the deployment of your organization and voilá.

IBMers: Drag and drop it to your bookmarks bar: tag this

According to Sacha, the bookmarklet builder was very handy during the creation of this bookmarklet.