Moving On To A New Job

Effective September 1st, I've started to transition to a new job. While I won't take the new job until October 1st, I've started the transition to get used to my new responsibilities.

When I first joined IBM more than 8 years ago, I joined as a developer in the Lotus Development organization. 2.5 years ago, I left Lotus Development to become one of the evangelists for social software and Enterprise 2.0 at IBM. That was a very rewarding experience and I truly enjoyed working with so many customers and helping them be successful with their Enterprise 2.0 deployment.

In the past 2.5 years, I've gotten to learn a lot about the industry, our competitors, the needs from our customers, how they use our products, how they would like to use our products, and more. When possible, I've created solutions and got my hands "dirty" to ensure the success of our customers. I've also collaborated heavily with many business partners. It's been a blast!

I still have to figure out, with my new manager, what blogging activity will be acceptable, but I hope I can continue to engage with you virtually as I've been doing in the past.

So with that, I'm hoping that I can take everything that I've learned and apply it in my new job because I'm re-joining the Lotus Development organization again, this time as a Product Manager for Social Software at IBM.

Web-Based Administration Panel for Lotus Connections

The past 48 hours have been pretty crazy for me. On Monday at 1am I left home to go to BOS then DFW. I had a a meeting at 10am in Plano, TX and that was the only way to get there on time. The meeting was very successful and then I headed up to Kansas City, MO for another meeting on Tuesday. Now, I'm on a plane heading back home.

As I was at the airport and started to catch up with my feed reader, I found an interesting tool that all Lotus Connections administrators should be aware of. For the longest time, most of the administration tasks for Lotus Connections were done from the command line. Starting today, anyone with web access to Lotus Connections can perform administrative tasks:

Quoting the article:

The design goal of the user interface (UI) for the Lotus Connections administration web interface is to create a simple and easy-to-use design that is consistent with the ISC experience, which includes consistent color palettes, typography, panels, table, page titles, navigation styles and buttons, and consistent terminology and experience. Usability, another important goal for the UI, includes displaying important information that is most relevant and having a search functionality that maps to key data.

You can download and install the web-based administration tool from here. Big thanks to Judy Piper, Nicholas Williams, and Eric Mallon for creating this for us.

Enjoy!

Lotus Connections Community Newsletter Generator Plug-In

As you know, I was recently out of the office for my paternity leave. In my previous post I hinted as how I was working with Sacha Chua on a new project. Well, it turns out that during my paternity leave, my first TAP (IBM's Technology Adoption Program) contribution was published: the Lotus Connections Community Newsletter Generator!

Based on some code that I had already written (and it's also used in the Lotus Connections Notifications Plug-In), Sacha Chua took my code and built an amazing toolkit for Lotus Connections community owners. Part of the toolkit quickly generates a newsletter based on the community's recent activities for distribution to community members. (IBMers, see my internal blog for more details that I can't disclose right now).

I then took Sacha's code and converted it into an Eclipse plugin. Just like my other plugin, this plugin will soon be available in the Plugin Catalog.

Here's a demo so you can see how it works.

Feedback from internal users has been overwhelmingly positive and I'm glad I can provide some value.

Let me know what other features you would like to see!

Enjoy!

3 weeks away from work: Only 53 emails!

So after 3 weeks of being away from the office, I'm back. What kept me out for so long? This beautiful baby that just arrived .

And besides this beautiful creature arriving, I was glad to open my email on Friday to find 570 unread emails! Yikes. Before starting to tackle this mountain of email, I decided to use Lotus Notes attention indicators to figure out which emails really needed my attention. Turns out, only 53 emails needed my attention, 6 were spam, and 511 were Bacn. So 53 emails over 15 works days works out to 3.5 emails per day. There's your proof that Enterprise 2.0 software significantly reduces the need for email.

Now, a lot of things happened while I was away and I wanted to do a quick re-cap:

• Lotus Connections v3 is now deployed on the Greenhouse - If you have a Greenhouse account, go take a peek!
• A little project that I've been working on with Sacha Chua was published to IBM TAP site (Technical Adoption Program). This is my 1st TAP contribution! - more on this later
• My Lotus Connections notifications plugin for Lotus Notes has been published to the Lotus Catalog - download and install from here.
• My Lotus Connections notifications plugin for Lotus Sametime has been published to the Lotus Catalog - download and install from here.
  
• The Australian Bureau of Statistics announced they have adopted Lotus Connections
• RIM released the 2.5 version of their Blackberry Client for Lotus Connections
• US Banks picks Lotus Connections over Microsoft SharePoint

Now I'm going to record a video of the thing Sacha and I are working on which will soon be in the Lotus Catalog as well.

How To Add Sametime Web Awareness to Lotus Connections

I while ago I had shared instructions on how to enable STLinks in Lotus Connections. STLinks was a way to add instant messaging awareness to any web application by using pure JavaScript.

Lotus Connections is integrated out of the box with Lotus Sametime. This integration, however, requires that you have the Lotus Sametime client installed, configured, and running in order for the awareness to work. A customer was asking me the other day if we could enable awareness without requiring the Sametime client. The answer is yes.

With the latest Sametime 8.5+ version there's an AJAX API for awareness similar to STLinks. Here's how you can use that API to add awareness in Lotus Connections:

1. Enable SSO between Lotus Connections and Sametime

2. The first step is to initialize the API. Add the following code to header.html

<!-- Adding for Sametime Awareness - START --> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://stproxy.acme.com/stwebclient/dojo_1.2.3/sametime/themes/WebClientAll.css" /> <script type="text/javascript"> // Settings for the proxy var stproxyConfig = { // Replace with the appropriate server & port server: "http://stproxy.acme.com", tokenLogin: true, // We want to not display the login UI isConnectClient: false }; // Commmented following line since djConfig is already initialized by Lotus Connections. // You will receive following error if you don't comment the following lines: // djConfig.locale is undefined // sap04/profiles/bundles/js/gzip_238210590/baseBundle.js //djConfig = { // parseOnLoad: true // //isDebug: true //}; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://stproxy.acme.com/stbaseapi/baseComps.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://stproxy.acme.com/stwebclient/dojo_1.2.3/sametime/livenameLight.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://stproxy.acme.com/stwebclient/widgets.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // User ID and password //var userID = "userID"; //var password = "password"; // Logged in correctly function loggedInOK() { // You can do other actions now that you are logged in } function logout() { stproxy.login.logout(); } // Error callback function loginFailed(reason, error) { // Something has gone wrong: display some information alert("Error: " + reason + ": " + error); } // Log in anonymously function loginUser() { stproxy.login.loginByToken(null, stproxy.awareness.AVAILABLE, "I'm available", loggedInOK, loginFailed); return true; } stproxy.addOnLoad(loginUser); </script> <!-- Adding for Sametime Awareness - END -->

3. Now add the following code anywhere in a page (for example, a blog or a wiki)

<div class="stmain tundra"> <div dojoType="sametime.LiveName" userId="luisb@acme.com"></div> </div>

4. An alternative is that you would like to add it as field in a user's Profile page. To do so, modify profiles-config.xml to add an attribute that looks like this:

<attribute showLabel="false" prependHtml="&lt;div class=&quot;stmain tundra&quot;&gt;&lt;div dojoType=&quot;sametime LiveName&quot; userId=&quot;" appendHtml="&quot;&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;">email</attribute>

Enjoy!