Recently, I started working with the CorasWorks team to develop an iWidget for Lotus Connections that would display data from a Microsoft Sharepoint server. If the name CorasWorks sounds familiar, is because I blogged about them a couple months back. They are a Microsoft Gold Certified Business Partner and have created a solution to bring some of the Lotus Connections components into Sharepoint.
What we wanted to do was develop an iWidget for Lotus Connections so that we could surface SharePoint data within Lotus Connections. More specifically, we wanted to show all the sites that a user has access to. Since CorasWorks provides a very nice API on top of Sharepoint this was very easily done.
I think it's also worth noting how this mashup was created:
- The iWidget is running on my domain: blog.lbenitez.com
- Lotus Connections is running on connections.demoibm.com
- Sharepoint is running on corasworks.net
Therefore, we are using 3 separate platforms and integrating these seamlessly! I think it really shows the power and flexibility of iWidgets and Lotus Connections. Here's a screenshot of how it looks:
Enjoy!
Luis - this is great stuff! Is there anyplace I can see a little bit bigger screen shot?
ReplyDeleteGracias Luis por compartir tan valiosa e importante informacion, te invito a conocer mi blog www.sharepoint2007.co.cc donde publique recientemente un resumen sobre tus exelentes articulos.
ReplyDeleteSaludos, Hector.
Luis this is good stuff. Despite as you say sharepoint isnt a competitor to Connections i think the integration between the two products is one which many people will be looking to deploy. Especially as many companies have Sharepoint as a document repository. Can you tell me if it is possible to get a copy of the code and what I might need in terms of running it. Would I need any licenses for Corusworks for example. Thanks
ReplyDeleteAndy Jones
Great job LUis with this. In these economic times I think we will find many of our customers who have both Lotus and SharePoint looking to us for helping in leveraging and integrating their investments and this is a great example of doing just that. :-) I posted a shout-out to your article here http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1475
ReplyDeleteLuis, thanks for making it happen. I posted about it at http://community.corasworks.net/blogs/williamsblog/archive/2009/01/17/corasworks-bridging-ibm-lotus-and-microsoft-sharepoint.aspx. The post has a link to the XML output of the Site Directory.
ReplyDeleteHi Christian,
ReplyDeleteHere's a high-resolution picture: http://blog.lbenitez.com/images/CorasWorksGadget.png
This is perfect! Thanks Luis, I have been waiting for this and now can share with my customers!!
ReplyDeleteHi Luis,
ReplyDeleteThis iWidget looks great. Is there a way to pass user id from lotus connections to the iframe which is being called. Or can a JavaScript function has access to logged in UserID? Any guidance regarding this will be great! Thanks a lot.
Varun, here's the information I got from development.
ReplyDelete------
For 2.0: You can rely on the 'user' variable to contain an email address
For 2.0.1: You can rely on the 'userid' variable to contain an internal identifier which you can use to query Profiles (using the &userid parameter) to always be present.
HOWEVER: there are two ways that 2.0.1 can be configured: to either allow or disallow the exposure of user's email addresses (the use case here is external internet facing deployments which should not allow email addresses to be harvested)
If email address exposure is disabled then you will not get a 'user' variable on the Home Page. You will only get 'userid' and what's more, the atom entry you get back when you query a user's profile using &userid will not contain their email address (as it is no longer exposed)
If a 2.0.1 deployment has email address exposure enabled (which is the default) then the existing 'user' variable containing the email of the logged in user will still be present.
------
Hope this helps!
Thanks Luis! You are amazing!
ReplyDeleteAny idea where I can read more about it? I couldn't find anything after searching :(
Thanks a ton!
Varun
Varun.. hmm.. I don't see any public documentation on it :(. I'll send a note to the developers. Thanks for bringing this up!
ReplyDeleteSince lotus connections has a developer wiki, I thought I would add the entry for userid. Before that, I tried to access variables user and userid in a greenhouse mashup iwidget. It returned undefined variable.
ReplyDeleteCould this be because I am testing it in Mashup and not connections homepage? Or I suspect my code it wrong.
Can you paste the code line which worked for you?
Thanks again!
Hi Luis!
ReplyDeleteThanks for this.
Looks like I will have to wait till Greenhouse Connection's homepage allows iWidgets!
BTW, since you write about 'How Socializing Accelerates Innovation in the Workplace from the perspective of a Millenia' , do checkout 'spigit'.
Thanks again!
Varun
P.S. Please remove your id for spammers!