Announcing IBM Connections Premier and IBM Connections Compliance -- Now Available

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As announced in the IBM Social Software blog, yesterday IBM released IBM Connections Premier, the latest offering built on top of IBM Connections, the leading business social collaboration platform.  IBM Connections Premier combines engaging employee collaboration applications and compliance discovery solutions, including granular policy controls for content inspection, logging and archiving of social and instant messaging communications. With IBM Connections Premier integrated collaboration and compliance discovery solutions, your organization can protect your brand and reputation, meeting corporate, legal or governance requirements, and engage and enable your entire workforce.

IBM Connections Premier offers:

• Ability to enforce acceptable use policies that lets your organization define policies at global, group or user levels. Monitor for and address the use of inappropriate or abusive language and objectionable actions.
• Protection of your brand and reputation with near real-time monitoring and alerts. Detect, flag and block IMs and file transfers based on key words, phrases and regular expressions.
• Reduction of legal costs through fast and simple content review and retrieval.
• Enhanced return on investment (ROI) by extending the life of existing archive and e-discovery investments. Tag, export and archive content in its original format to e-discovery or enterprise content management platforms.

Check out this video which walks through a scenario to highlight the importance of secure collaboration and empowering confidence throughout the organization to accelerate innovation while keeping information safe:



To learn more, check out the announcement letter.

IBM Connections in Cloud Now Features Real-Time Audio and Video Chat

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Today, when you log in to IBM Connections in the cloud you should notice a nice little surprise:  you can now engage with your peers via audio and/or video chat. While you've always been able to instant message with your colleagues within IBM Connections, sometimes typing is just not fast enough. And with communication being roughly 70% non-verbal, video becomes an excellent capability to get business done... NOW!

Now, you can go from a post in IBM Connection and escalate to a voice call or a video call at no extra cost.

This is now available to Connections customers in the cloud. Plans start at $6/user/month so if you haven't started using this platform, you can start today with a 60-day free trial.

Of course, I had to test this out to check out how it looks. So reached out to Albert, and got him over video in just 2 seconds!

But wait... there's another surprise! Up until now you've been able to share files through Chat from your computer. Now you can now share files with a chat partner from your IBM Connections Files. Let's say that you get a question from the field asking for the latest roadmap for your product (you know this happens a lot right?).  Now I can take a file from Connections, and when I do this, the recipient automatically gets reader access to the file!  Magic!

Here's how that looks:

Enjoy your new capabilities !

Announcing IBM Connections Suite 4.5.1 - It keeps getting sweeter!

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Today, I'm happing to announce the latest release of the IBM Connections Suite, IBM's social collaboration platform. The IBM Connections Suite provides a single offering that organizations can deploy to build a powerful intranet, become more agile and create competitive business value.

The latest update released today adds many more collaboration features to provide a top notch experience for users. For example, teammates can work together and align on business objectives in real time using instant messaging and web meetings deeply integrated as part of communities.

A rich content library allows members to securely manage their content and use approval routing to track the progress towards the validation of the document.

From ideation, to microblogging, to real-time team collaboration, to document management, the IBM Connections Suite 4.5.1 is the most secure and complete collaboration platform out there. Remember: content is only valuable when the right people can find it at the right time.

Here's just a preview of what's new:

Here's a demo so you can see it in action from our new Product Manager, Albert Nichols:

For more information, the announcement letter is here.

A Key Social Business Benefit: Remove Barriers to Collaboration

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By now, you are probably aware that we have updated our social collaboration cloud services and that the latest monthly release of the IBM Connections mobile apps have been posted to the app stores (click here for iOS and here for Android).

The big feature this time around for IBM Connections is File Sync which started rolling out to users Monday and should be available to all cloud users by Friday of this week.

As someone who works from home and travels a lot, I depend on my tablet. Wherever I go, I have instant access to the content that I need, irrespective of whether or not I have an internet connection. And when I'm connected, it gets even better as I have instant access to experts, I can start a video chat with them or a multi-way video meeting and just get business done! I still remember just 6-7 years ago when I travelled how important it was to have access to a telephone jack so I could try to plugin and get business done over a 56K connection. How much have times changed!

Two weeks ago, I demo'ed at the event IBM held where we covered how Social + Mobile + Cloud has transformed how we work today. There, I showed how File Sync works for me and a preview of the upcoming Sametime 9 mobile apps.

In case you missed it, I've included the demo below:

Want to get started with these solutions? Start a free trial today!

Social + Mobile + Cloud Transform My Work

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Today, IBM held a virtual event to showcase the latest release of their Enterprise Social Network. The event kicked off with the following video which we made available late last night:

Then, Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author with Andrew McAfee of Race Against the Machine, did a keynote with his take on how today's technologies are transforming the way we do work. In his keynote, he argued that it's not about inventing new technologies but inventing better ways to work with them.

I can definitely validate that if it wasn't for the social solution that I use every day, IBM Connections, I wouldn't be as productive as (believe) I am being a mobile employee for one of the largest companies in the world. It gives me the right capabilities to remove obstacles and barriers, and just move business forward ! Time and time again, I continue to find examples of how productivity increases by leveraging these new tools. That's what makes me passionate about doing what I do at work. I want everyone to benefit from a social business transformation!!

If you missed the event (and my mobile demo from my iPad), you can catch the replay here: http://ibm.co/reinventwork. And to continue the conversation, tomorrow, I'll be participating in a Twitter chat so if you want to participate, you can get all the details here.

See you tomorrow in the Twitter chat!

Demo: IBM Connections Improves Contact Center Processes

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Today, I wanted to share this quick video with you. It shows IBM's Social Business Platform, IBM Connections, deeply integrated into the work life of a help desk representative.

This allows an agent to reduce the amount of time required to find the right information to help a caller.   

Here's one of the examples shown in the video. A caller selects that they want help on increasing their credit limit via the automated voice prompts. In the agent desk, the IBM Connections community with this information, and even more specifically, the exact page within the community is opened with all the information the agent needs to resolve the call immediately.

Check out the 4 min video below:

This great integration between IBM Connections and the contact center drives first contact resolution and can reduce the time that an agent spends on the phone solving customer issues.

What a great example of infusing social into existing business processes, a key in becoming a successful social business.

To learn more, check out AVDS - Automated Voice & Data Solutions.

Demos of IBM Notes 9 and IBM Connections 4.5 Launch Now Available

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By now you know that this week we launched IBM Notes 9 and IBM Connections 4.5. On Wednesday, we had a webcast to launch these two products.

At the webcast we had Ray Wang, from Constellation Research, kick things off by talking about the 9 C's of collaboration.   

During the webcast, Scott Souder and myself did demos of our respective products. Those demos are now available online in case you missed it (or you want to see it over and over and over again! )

Here's the IBM Notes 9.0 demo:

Here's the IBM Connections 4.5 demo:

The full replay of the launch webcast is also available here.

Enjoy!!

IBM Connect 2013 and Product Demos Available

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Building on the launch of IBM Connections 4.5 and IBM Notes 9.0, the demos that were done during the IBM Connect 2013 keynote (aka OGS) (aka Opening General Session) are now available directly from the main IBM.com/social page.

From that page, there's a demo tab which then brings you to a page with individual product demos as well as the OGS demos from IBM Connect 2013.

And clicking on See Demo shows the following movie. Here you will see a little of IBM Connections 4.5. Additionally, I demo the new real-time collaboration capabilities provided by Sametime as well as some of the new features provided by IBM Notes 9.0. If you couldn't make it to yesterday's launch webcast a replay of that will be available soon, so for now, enjoy the following video:

As a reminder, IBM Connections 4.5 will be available on March 29th, 2013, so get ready!

Enjoy!

Demo: Increasing Productivity with IBM Notes Social Edition

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Today, Ed Brill and team announced IBM Notes 9 Social Edition and the upcoming public beta to be released in a few weeks. If you missed it, check out Ed's blog for a link to the replay.

I've been using the internal beta for a few weeks now and really like the integration with IBM Connections, IBM's social collaboration platform.  Based on personal experience, IBM Connections makes everything social and improves the productivity of its users.  And the IBM Notes 9 Social Edition is a prime example of that.

The video below gives you a preview of some of the new integration points of IBM Connections, real-time communications powered by Sametime, and Notes all in one seamlessly integrated user experience.  The video also shows video conferencing both from Notes and from a community in IBM Connections.



I've already gotten some very good feedback on this video and I'm interested to know: What do you think about this video ?

VSee Releases New Real-Time Integration for IBM Connections

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VSee has just released new integration where they have brought their real-time collaboration capabilities into IBM Connections.

The integration allows companies that already use VSee to:

• See a list of community members along with presence awareness
• Click-to-chat
• Instant video chat with community members
• Instant screen share with community members

Check out a quick demo below:

For more information and to access this integration, you can access it from the IBM Connections App Catalog here. And for those of you who are using IBM Sametime, of course you can do the same things with IBM Sametime as described here.

Announcing the IBM Connections Suite - Sweet !

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IBM has just announced its new social business offering: the IBM Connections Suite. The IBM Connections Suite provides the best of the best communications, content, and social capabilities in one package creating the ultimate social business offering.

How does a business become a social business? IBM has identified a foundational set of capabilities that—when implemented as a whole—can allow your business to become more social. To socially enable your workforce, improve customer care and insight, and enhance product and service innovation, an organization must consider how it will Reach, Engage, Discover, and Act as it becomes a social business. These are the 4 key services of a social business.

- Reach people where they live and work

- Enable people to engage productively in a business context

- Monitor and analyze social data to discover new business insights

- Act on insight for business advantage

The IBM Connections Suite delivers these 4 capabilities, and it's all in one package! What does it include? Everyhing you could want: profiles, communities, microblogging soft phone / VoIP, presence awareness, instant messaging, web meetings, video, forums, wikis, social analytics, blogs, media gallery, ideation, real-time collaboration with communities, peer to peer file sharing, document libraries, mobile apps, and more!

To demonstrate some of the capabilities provided by the IBM Connections Suite, I've created three demos. Each demo shows how the IBM Connections Suite delivers business value and helps companies achieve one of three outcomes: workforce optimization, improving customer care processes, and accelerate innovation.

Demo 1 - IBM Connections Suite for Workforce Optimization

Demo 2 - IBM Connections Suite for Customer Care

Demo 3 - IBM Connections Suite for Accelerating Innovation

Of course, it's hard to show the 300+ features that are in the IBM Connections Suite in a couple of 5 minutes videos, so I'll be interested in knowing what you would like me to show more of. Please let me know in the comments below.

The announcement letter with more details, can be found here.

How To Add a Web Meeting Link to IBM Connections Profiles

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All credit here goes to Mitch Cohen for the idea. As I've been updating my demo server this week to record a video on it, it turns out that Mitch asked how to add an attribute to IBM Connections Profiles so that it would be a clickable link to a user's web meeting (whether it's SmartCloud Meetings, VSee, WebEx, etc).

The process for adding a custom attribute to Profiles is documented here, but let me just show you how to do it specifically for web meetings. In the example below, I'm going to focus on SmartCloud Meetings, but if you want to do it for WebEx, for example, it should be very straightforward to modify the configuration that I present below:

1. Check out profiles-config.xml
2. Open profiles-config.xml with your favorite text editor
3. Add the following line under the <profileDataModel> - <profileExtensionAttributes> section:
   
   

   <simpleAttribute extensionId="meetingId" length="64" />

   
   
   
4. Now scroll down to the <profileLayout> - <jobLayout> section (or to the <contactInformation> section depending on where you want to add it) and add the following line:
   
   

   <extensionAttribute showLabel="false" prependHtml="&lt;a href='http://apps.lotuslive.com/meetings/join?id=" appendHtml="'&gt;Join My Meeting&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;" labelKey="label.contactInformation.extattr.meetingId" editable="true" bundleIdRef="myStrings" extensionIdRef="meetingId" />

   
   
   
5. If you want, you can also add it to the businessCard section so that it appears every time a business card is shown.
6. Save and close the file
7. Check it back in
8. Restart Connections

Once you restart the server, you'll see something like this show up for people who have defined their Meeting ID by going into Edit My Profile.

Now if I were to pull up Jasmine's profile, I'll always be a click away to her virtual meeting room. Clicking on the link immediately launches the web meeting and I don't have to do anything else. Very easy!

Enjoy!

Polycom and IBM Help Build a Social Business

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Here's a cool demo created by Polycom showing how their solution integrates with IBM Sametime, IBM Connections, and other office productivity suites that I stumbled upon today.

Some of this was shown at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 during the Opening General Session.

Check it out!

Download Now: IBM Connections 3.0.1

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The latest version of the Connections product is now available for download: 3.0.1 only . If my math is correct, this is the 10th major release for the product in the last 4 years and it comes only 130 days since our last release which was 3.0.

So what's new in 3.0.1? Tons! Here's a recap of what was announced at Lotusphere and is now available:

Media Gallery for sharing and viewing media in a community
The Media Gallery feature permits community members to upload and share images and videos for viewing within a community. The Media Gallery page displays thumbnails of the multimedia content in your community's media gallery. You can see who uploaded a file and when the file was last updated. You can also see how many people have downloaded or commented on a file, and preview photos or videos using the gallery previewer.

Ideation Blog for sharing, commenting, and voting on ideas in a community
The Ideation Blog feature is designed to help make it simpler for community members to post new ideas, vote on them, and turn them into projects. A community owner can choose to add the Ideation Blog feature to their community. Community members can then post new ideas to the Ideation Blog. As new ideas are added, community members can post comments and cast votes for their favorite ideas. An Activity can be created for promising ideas so that work can proceed on turning the idea into reality. This feature can be used, for example, to gather suggestions from customers on how to improve products.

New community content moderation capabilities
Community owners can moderate content using pre-moderation or post-moderation. Pre-moderation enables a community owner to approve or reject content before it appears in the community. With post-moderation, a community member can flag content as inappropriate. This action sends a notification to the community owner who can then review the flagged item and take appropriate action by quarantining the content or dismissing the flag.

Integration with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories
The ECM integration allows users to store, access, and edit documents residing in FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Manager from within a Community.

Integration with IBM Lotus® Sametime® server
The IBM Lotus Sametime server integration allows users to collaborate in real time from IBM Connections.

Suzanne Livingston has created a demo that shows all the new features.

You have several options when installing 3.0.1:

• Upgrade directly from 2.5
• Apply as a fixpack on top of 3.0
• Install 3.0.1 directly (ie. if you are new to Connections, there's no need to install 3.0 first)

I installed 3.0.1 last week and the process went super smooth. One thing that caught me was that I forgot to configure the AJAX proxy for my ECM server. So don't forget to do that after you install 3.0.1.
If you want to learn more, I'll be presenting about Connections 3.0.1 and its extensibility options at IBM's Impact #ibmimpact conference in Las Vegas next week. Both of my sessions are on Wednesday. I'll also be manning the Exceptional Work Experience ped. Hope to see you there!
So go on and download and enjoy!

Social Business ROI - Why Do You Need This With Examples Like This?

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I can't think of a better way to start the year 2011 than with an amazing success story that led to increased customer satisfaction thanks to social collaboration. My colleague Fred Raguillat wrote this up, so I'll let you read through his awesome story:

---

This is another scenario where IBM's Social Collaboration Platform & Atlas made finding experts & collaboration across continents an easy task..!

Adam Ramsay and Rob Thatcher from IBM UK needed Dev Technical assistance fixing a deployment problem with Mobile for their customer. Using IBM social software, we were able to successfully resolve the problem within 24 hours across two different continents.

Here's the sequence of events...

16:45, Monday December 6th GMT, Adam Sametimed with me, asking for help with his problem.  Michael Roche (Lotus Connections Distinguished Engineer) had referred Adam to me for assistance on "mobile application issues with applications".

By 17:12 I had all the information I needed from Adam and Sametimed Luis Benitez for help identifying developer(s) in in the U.S. that could assist. Luis performed a quick tag search using Lotus Connections ('mobile', 'development', 'connections'), identifying the best two qualified developers. With three clicks he narrowed down a company of 400,000 employees to 2 employees!

I then used Atlas to find my "contact entry point" (my link to those guys). I then mailed a "help request" to all the relevant parties..

At 18:30 Jesse Hill, one of the mobile LC developers, confirmed that he would be happy to help..

At 8:00 the next morning the UK team sent the log files over to Jesse in the U.S. By that afternoon Jesse sent a fix on to Rob. Rob made the relevant changes, and by 17:00 Rob sent an email to confirm that all issues were resolved.

Sounds easy, yes!? but think if we did not have those tools in our reach, this would have taken for ever..!

Thanks to IBM Social Software, we’ve got another happy customer! ;-)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

From: Robert Thatcher/UK/IBM@IBMGB
To: Adam Ramsay/UK/IBM@IBMGB
Cc: Tony Hickman/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Jesse Hill/Phoenix/IBM@IBMUS, Fred Raguillat/Ireland/IBM@IBMIE
Date: 07/12/2010 17:13
Subject: Re: Fw: Help Request! RBS Lotus Connections mobile assistance


Adam,

Headline is good news Mobile is fixed and working.

Longer story is that Jesse found the problem very quickly, and it is fixed in 2.5.0.2. But rather than disturb the system Jesse gave me a work around to the Configuration file. I have made the change to the config file, and restarted the Mobile app only. I would suggest a complete restart of WAS when convenient to confirm that the config changes did not upset other functions.

THANKS Jesse.

Rob

---

How's that for a success story? And it would've been less than 24 hours if it wasn't for the timezone difference.

My Experience Installing Lotus Connections 3.0 for the First Time

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Yup. Believe it or not, yesterday was the first time I installed Lotus Connections 3.0. While I had the beta 1 and beta 2 code I never had the time to sit down and install it in my own image. In between my job role change, the new baby, planning two product launches and Lotusphere, it's been a crazy second half.

Things seem to be settling down and I'm getting used to my new workload. I did the install as I'm helping prepare a new super awesome demo environment with Quickr, Cognos, Sharepoint, Sametime, and Connections all integrated together ( I will soon release more details on it once it's ready).

I was pleasantly surprised with all the improvements that have been done in the installer of this new version. The install took about 6 hours to get everything up and running. A couple of notes:

• I did this on a VMWare so in real hardware this time would definitely be less.
• I also did this sequentially. If you did it all in parallel it would be ~3 hours.
• Most of the time was spent just watching progress bars since the installation has been streamlined where I just click Next, Next, Next, Next, and so on.

Here's what I installed (and how long each step took me):

• WebSphere 7 + fixpacks (~1.25 hrs)
• TDI v7 + fixpacks (~30 mins)
• DB 9.7 (~30 mins)
• IBM HTTP Server v7 + fixpacks (~15 mins)
• Lotus Connections v3.0 (~1.5 hrs)
• Post-installation steps (~1.5 hrs)

To help me along, I followed the step-by-step instructions with screenshots provided in the wiki here. Those instructions were definitely key in helping me move along so fast. One of the things that I always like in documentation is screenshots and that document definitely fits the bill. I'm assuming that anyone who's doing a Show-N-Tell session at Lotusphere 2011 on how to install Connections will be able to just rip off the screenshots from there!

Anyway, congrats to the development team and the documentation for all the improvements that have been made in this area.

It's Podcast Season!

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Two weeks ago I told you about a podcast I'd recorded with my colleague Sacha Chua. This time I got to participate in the This Week In Lotus podcast. As you may remember, I talked about this podcast several weeks ago because they were discussing the IDC report where IBM is named the Market Leader in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms.

So, last week Stuart McIntyre, one of the show's hosts, invited me to join the podcast. That meant that last Friday I had to be up and ready by 7am. That was pretty easy, however, given I have a 2.5 year old and a 2 month old who are ready to go and have fun by 5am.

In this episode, we get a chance to talk about:

• the article from FAST company re: Why IBM could be bigger than Facebook in Social Media
• my new job
• Jon Mell returning back to IBM from Headshift
• and other great stuff for a fun filled hour

Make sure you catch the tips section, I think there's a couple of things there you'll like.

To listen to this episode, click here or subscribe via iTunes.

How To Add Sametime Web Awareness to Lotus Connections

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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!

Creating a Lotus Connections Plug-In for Sametime

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Last week I posted about a new plug-in I created for Sametime, the Lotus Connections Notifications Plug-In. The plug-in is basically a feed reader of all the things that your colleagues are working on inside Lotus Connections, but it's a lot easier to use for the big majority of users. And because it brings Lotus Connections to the desktop, it drives adoption.

One of the comments left on my blog asked some technical details on which APIs I used to create the plug-in. I briefly mentioned that I used the Notifications API, but I wanted to expand on that. Thus, warning, the following is very geeky!

When I first started, I looked at the sample plug-ins included with the Sametime SDK, specifically the com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.sample.snippets sample. If you want to learn more about how alerts work, I recommend taking a peek at the sample code provided in that simple plug-in.

I think that the best way to explain this is go through the flow of the plug-in and mention the classes being used:

1. First, the plug-in is activated during startup because one of its classes implements org.eclipse.ui.IStartup
   
   
2. At that point, the plug-in's Activator gets loaded and a job is created. This job is a custom class that extends org.eclipse.core.runtime.jobs.Job and overrides the run(IProgressMonitor monitor) method. This method runs in a separate thread and is scheduled to run every 60 seconds.
   
   
3. Once the job is triggered, we make a query to Lotus Connections to retrieve this feed: https://connections.acme.com/news/atom/stories/public. This feed returns the same content shown in the Discover tab of the Lotus Connections Homepage.
   
   
4. For each story retrieved, we check to see if it's from one of the user's colleagues. (you can retrieve the user's colleagues by querying https://connections.acme.com/profiles/atom/connections.do?connectionType=colleague&userid=....
   
   
5. If a story is from one of our colleagues, we create a notification using the Sametime Notifications API. To do this, we create an instance of com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.messages.AlertUserMessage. Once instantiated, we set some options, and then call the post() method.
   
   
6. Once the alert has been posted, the framework checks what type of alert it is. In plugin-xml, I've defined that this alert should be 'drawn' by a custom class I created called NewsUpdateWindow.
   
   
7. NewsUpdateWindow is extends com.ibm.rcp.realtime.alerts.ui.DefaultAlertWndow and overrides the buildContents(Composite parent) method.
   
   
8. In this method, we follow the basic RCP UI guidelines to build the UI of the alert.
   
   
9. For my particular alert, I chose to use Sametime's embedded browser: com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.browser.Browser. The reason is that the atom feed returns an HTML version of the news feed. Therefore, the alert looks like what you would see if you were reading the stories directly in Lotus Connections via a regular browser ( and I don't need to do any extra parsing ).
   
   
10. At this point, the alert is shown to the user, the job ends and we wait until the job is triggered again, 60 seconds later.

I've included the source code as part of the plug-in. Thus, as soon as the plug-in becomes available you'll be able to see the nitty gritty of how this plug-in works.

I hope this information is valuable to you. Please let me know if there's anything else you would like to know.

Lotus Connections Notifications Plugin for Sametime

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For the last month or so, I've been consumed working on a side project. You see, every once in a while, IBM hosts an internal coding competition which takes place during 24 hours; it's called HackDay. On the last HackDay, one of the best developers for Lotus Connections, Vincent Burckhardt, created a desktop application for Lotus Connections. The application would show an alert periodically showing the activity that your colleagues are doing in Lotus Connections. The alerts would include status updates, uploaded files, recommended blog entries, etc.

There were 2 things that I heard from IBMers that they wanted improve: 1) decrease the memory requirements and 2) enable alert replay (for those cases where you step away). Therefore, I decided to port the application into an Eclipse plugin for Lotus Sametime/Lotus Notes.

Thanks to the Lotus Expeditor framework (which is based on Eclipse), it was actually really simple to get the basis of the application going. Because Lotus Sametime already has a Notifications API and Framework, I decided to build the plugin for that (though it would work on instances of Notes that have Sametime embedded). Once I had the first iteration of the plugin ready, I released it as a private alpha build inside IBM. I had around 12 alpha testers which tested on various platforms/configurations.

I also asked in Twitter for alpha testers to make sure this plugin would work outside of IBM. All of the alpha testers gave me some good feedback, and 8 iterations later we are here today. In all, I've spent about 60 hours creating this plugin (spread over a month).

One issue that I ran into was leveraging Expeditor's Accounts API. I wanted to use that API, but I kept getting NullPointerExceptions when processing an account update. I think the documentation could be improved a bit in this area.

You can view a demo of my plugin here:

Based on the video, are there any additional features you would like to see?

Instructions on how to install the plugin will be available soon as I'm waiting for it to be published in the Lotus Catalog. Stay tuned!