Check Out What's New In IBM Connections Social Cloud - Q1 2016

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As we get rolling into the second quarter of the year, I'll be sharing soon what to expect in terms of deliveries for IBM Connections Cloud for this quarter. First, I wanted to take the time and summarize the deliveries that we did in Q1 and had been announced at IBM Connect 2016 (and did you see that we'll be at the Moscone Center next year on February 20 - 23, 2017 ? Sweet !)

So what became available in the first three months of the year ? Jim Puckett, one of the product managers for IBM Connections, put together this quick slide deck that walks through all the new enhancements.

What's New in IBM Connections Social Cloud Q1 2016 from Jim Puckett

Note: the mobile updates require a new mobile update so check the app stores for an update (at this point the target is next week).

As a reminder, you can always keep track of the enhancements (current and past) in this page. Still not on IBM Connections Cloud and want to learn more? Check out this video:



Also, don't forget to sign up for Social Connections 10 as that will be a great opportunity to meet with the Designers and Product Managers and check out what else is coming!

Communardo Further Integrates Confluence with IBM Connections

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I've talked about integration of IBM Connections with Confluence in the past. Communardo has created 3 new integration points to bring together IBM Connections and Atlassian's Confluence. These integration points are important for organizations that may be using both products and want to provide more synergy between them. This is yet another example of IBM Connections as a social layer, where you can embed Connections into other business apps allowing you to bring social to the end users.

The integration points are:

• Surface IBM Connections' person card within Confluence ( this is available as a plug-in from Atlassian's Marketplace) allowing profile data to be kept in just one system (IBM Connections)
• Use the IBM Connections Activity Stream to connect the decentralized Confluence wikis to save time finding information and avoid switching back-and-forth between systems.
• Confluence work rooms will surface within the list of Communities in the IBM Connections interface to surface previously hidden work laces.

To see it in action, check out the 5 minute demo below:


To learn more, check out Communardo's product page.

Announcing IBM Connections 4.5 IFR2: Advanced content editing for all!

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Now that you know how the IBM Connect 2014 OGS demo was built, let's get into the nitty gritty and recap the announcements that were made.

Shortly after the keynote, I had the opportunity to deep dive into the roadmap for IBM Connections together with our lead architect. So what did we talk about ?

Well, it turns out that a big item that we talked about was today's announcement.

Today, we are announcing our first delivery for 2014: IBM Connections 4.5 IFR2. This release provides an entitlement change to allow all of our IBM Connections 4.5+ customers to use an advanced rich text editor.

This advanced editor streamlines content creation allowing users to focus on creating and sharing content and not on formatting.  This in turn accelerates adoption and usage across the enterprise. The new advanced rich text editor adds several features such as:

• High fidelity copy/paste from Microsoft Word or a web browser
• Inline spell checking as-you-type, with alternatives and synonyms
• Embedding of social media links
• Track changes and commenting
• Hyperlink checking
• Content templates
• and more... 

Here's a quick demo so you can see it in action:


The download for the new editor will be available on Thursday February 13th when we officially eGA IBM Connections 4.5 IFR2. This new editor is powered by Ephox which some of you may already be using inside WebSphere Portal and/or Domino. Update 14/February/2014: The Ephox team has put together a new video:



How's that for starting the year on a positive note ? I'll share more about the announcements from IBM Connect in upcoming posts.

Preview: Polls and surveys for IBM Connections

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Now that we are officially in second quarter and IBM Connections 4.5 shipped, I can talk a little bit more about more things coming this year, specifically this quarter. Coming in a few weeks is a new add-on for Connections that will add polls and surveys.

With this add-on, community managers will be able to:

• Use a question-based authoring tool to create polls and surveys directly from the community
• Configure who can see results
• Configure if results are tied to a user or collected anonymously
• Notify members via the activity stream. Members will be able to respond via the embedded experience (even from their mobile devices)
• Notify members via an email notification. Members will be able to respond via the embedded experience (requires a modern email client such as IBM Notes 9).
• and much more...

The Product Manager for this offering is Marty Lechleider so if you have any questions (such as licensing), reach out to him. In fact, Marty created the following demo to show off the new capabilities of Forms Experience Builder "Next" and how it integrates seamlessly into IBM Connections:

Enjoy!

IBM SmartCloud Now with IBM Docs and more IBM Connections Capabilities

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IBM Docs was deployed to the IBM SmartCloud this weekend. As you probably know, IBM Docs has been available now for about a year in Beta. As you can imagine, it's very exciting to finally take this out of beta and make it available to our customers.

So, on Saturday night, we updated our SmartCloud data centers around the world to deploy IBM Docs as well as added more capabilities to IBM Connections on the cloud. IBM SmartCloud Docs is simple yet powerful - you can get started quickly, but still have the advanced features that you need. Start new online documents, or view or edit Microsoft™ Office and IBM® Symphony™ files already stored in Files. IBM Docs lets you simultaneously edit a document with other contributors, greatly improving the simplicity and efficiency by which teams build documents.

• Choose to work independently or co-edit with others in real time, seeing changes in the color that is assigned to each editor.
• Leave a comment or reply to one in the context of the document
• Publish and manage versions of the document in Files
• View the contents of published documents online - no need to download
• Download documents as Microsoft Office or .PDF format as needed

IBM Docs customers can easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM SmartCloud Docs is available at no extra cost for SmartCloud Engage Advanced subscribers, and is available as an add-on for SmartCloud Engage and SmartCloud Connections subscribers. Check out the demo below:


Finally, IBM SmartCloud Connections subscribers now have the ability to use the new Ideation, Blogs, and Wikis capability in their communities for enhanced team collaboration.

As the product manager for IBM SmartCloud Connections, I'll be sharing the roadmap at IBM Connect. So if you haven't registered yet, go ahead and do it today!

Using IBM Connections Demos Now Available

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When IBM Connections 4.0 was released, I shared the IBM Connections 4.0 Overview demo. That's a great way to get your users excited for what's new in the 4.0 release. And as you know, I'm a big fan of videos and I think they are a great way to drive adoption.

Now as your users look for more in-depth demos of the capabilities of IBM Connections, you can use the following which are available in YouTube. And here's a tip! When you share these videos with your users, simply post them in a Wiki or a Blog in your Connections deployment to help spread the word.

Make sure you watch all these videos. I recommend the one for Search so you can see the new Trending widget that was added into IBM Connections 4.0. It's very cool!

Homepage

Activities

Blogs

Bookmarks

Communities

Connections Mail

Files

Forums

Moderation

No video, but I did want to highlight this awesome document posted to ibm.com. And if you are interested in a video, then I can offer this one on how to customize existing reports that ship with IBM Connections 4.0.

Search

Wikis

IBM positioned as a Leader in the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

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Today is my 2nd year anniversary as one of the Product Managers in IBM's Social Software team and have some great news to share. Analysts at Gartner have positioned IBM in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. IBM’s placement is based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision. Just a few weeks ago, IBM released IBM Connections 4.0 the core of the IBM Social Business Platform.

This new report adds to the recent analyst reports from Forrester and Aragon Research which also list IBM as a Leader in their respective research reports. IBM Connections has also been listed as the worldwide market share leader by IDC.

I'm extremely proud to be part of the IBM Connections team! If you want to learn more about IBM Connections, check out this quick 3 minute video created by my colleagueSuzanne Livingston:

Check out the other 9 videos that Suzanne has created. These are great "shorts" you can easily share with your colleagues and even embed directly in Connections to show users what's new in IBM Connections 4.0 and they cover the different components of Connections including Mobile.

Now Available: IBM Connections Wikis Tips & Tricks

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Recently, I've been working with a number of customers who are migrating content from other tools/platforms into IBM Connections Wikis.

Immediately, I started noticing a pattern in the questions and they were all trying to do very similar things. This gave me an idea to leverage the Best Practice sub-community of the IBM Connections Users community to share tips & tricks.

If you use Connections or if your company is in the process of deploying Connections, you MUST follow this community. I talked about the community last week as members came together during Lotusphere 2012 #ls12. The community is where a lot of Connections users from all over the world and from various industries and organizations are coming together to share best practices on adoption, deployment and more.

Inside IBM, a wiki had already been created to share tips & tricks. I was able to leverage that and make those examples public so that everyone could benefit from this great library of tips. In there, you'll find things like how to embed podcasts, video, Google Maps, and much more. Here's a screenshot of how it looks.

To access this wiki, click here and log in with your Greenhouse credentials. If you haven't registered yet on the Greenhouse, you can register here.

Enjoy!

New Residency Announcement: Customizing Connections User Interface

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Last week, IBM announced a new Redbooks Wiki residency for Connections. The residency is open to IBMers, business partners, and customers.

The residency will take part during a 5 week period between July 18th and August 19th. They are looking for 6 people who have done work around customizing the UI for Connections. Here's a quick excerpt from the residency page:

This new Lotus Wiki delivable will provide guidance to customers seeking to expand capabilities with IBM Connections. These new features will provide a rich user experiences, increase end user satisfaction, productivity, and value-added use of IBM Connections inside and outside the organization. Designed with a Social Business in mind, IBM Connections gives you fast access to everyone in your professional network - your colleagues, customers and partners. The latest capabilities in IBM Connections such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.

This residency consists a total period of 5 weeks, from July 18 through August 19 and requires 6 residents. This is a remote residency. All participants will participate from their home office location and interact with others in remote fashion.

If you are interested in signing up and have 20 hours/week to commit to this, go up to the residency page for more information: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/residents.nsf/Residency/14449F324AF10D83852578A40069390C?OpenDocument

Hope that a lot of you who are doing tremendous work sign up!

New Portlets Available for Connections 3.0.1

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Because Mac Guidera is out of the office and is probably not able to share these great news (he's the Product Manager for the awesome Connections plugins), I figured I would do so. Today we made available new portlets for Connections 3.0.1. As I mentioned earlier, we had 9 portlets for: Wikis, Activities, Profiles, Bookmarks, Tag Cloud, and Blogs.

Today, we've released new portlets that support Ideation blogs and add support for 3rd party authentication providers (TAM / Siteminder).

Even though the portlets are called Connections 3.0.1 Portlets, they support:

• IBM Lotus Connections 2.5
• IBM Lotus Connections 3.0
• IBM Connections 3.0.1
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.1.5.2*
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server 7.0.0.1*
• Microsoft Windows XP SP3
• Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (32-bit, 64-bit toleration)
• Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8
• Mozilla Firefox 3.5, 3.6
• Apple Safari 4

You can download the portlets, for free as usual, from the Lotus App Catalog here: https://greenhouse.lotus.com/plugins/plugincatalog.nsf/assetDetails.xsp?action=editDocument&documentId=511C128045FCD5D1852577B60055AD81

Thanks to the plugin team for making this available!

How To Customize the CKEditor in Quickr for Domino

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Last week I was asked how to customize the rich text editor that's embedded in Quickr for Domino. For those of you who don't know, the rich text editor included in Quickr for Domino is CKEditor.

So back to the task at hand. The request that I got was how to add the HTML source view to the rich text editor. The HTML source view allows someone with HTML knowledge to go in and customize the HTML or even used advanced HTML code to add more advanced content to the page.

I remember that I'd seen this tip out somewhere so I reached out to the social web. I eventually found out that the tip was shared in the Skype Quickr chat. This is a group chat of IBMers, business partners and customers who are all interested in Quickr. I believe the chat was initiated by Stuart McIntyre who also runs the Quickr Blog.

In the chat I found my answer and I figured I would share it with you in case you ever need something similar.

To add the Flash toolbar button to insert movies into the rich text editor:

Make the following change to this file:

data\domino\html\qphtml\html\common\qrdconfig.js

in Line 111 change from:

['Image', 'Table','Link','Smiley'],

to

['Image', 'Flash', 'Table','Link','Smiley'],

To add the HTML source view into the rich text editor:

in Line 119 change from:

['HorizontalRule', 'SpecialChar', 'Blockquote','Anchor']

to

['HorizontalRule', 'SpecialChar', 'Blockquote','Anchor', 'Source']

An Alternate Method

The method above has one difficulty... it must be re-applied every time you install a fixpack. Rob Novak has shared with us an alternate approach that won't get overwritten each time you install a fixpack:

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

Here's how to do this without being susceptible to fixpack overwrites. Quickr Domino, being based on Dojo 1.3.2 and using widgets to render itself, now has a widget registry that is extensible. You can modify a file called widgetRegistryConfig_ext.js in order to instruct Quickr to use alternate widgets. So instead of changing the qrdconfig.js one directly, you can modify this file and tell it to use your own.

The easiest way to do this is to find the widgetRegistryConfig_ext.js file which is initially empty and located in:

data\domino\html\qphtml\widgets\resources\

Then, make a copy of the above referenced qrdconfig.js in another location relative to the html directory, such as:

data\domino\html\snapps\

Make the modifications to the COPY of the file you just made as indicated in your post - not the original.

Next, we need a controller to tell it to load our copy, so we copy over the file:

data\domino\html\qphtml\widgets\page\field\ckRichText.js

Into our new directory structure:

data\domino\html\snapps\widgets\page\field\chRichText.js

How do we override it? By using Dojo's provide-require-declare methodology (long subject) in our copy of this file. Near the top, just before the renderedit: function() we add the following:

dojo.provide("snapps.widgets.page.field.ckRichText"); dojo.require("quickr.widgets.page.field._ckRichText"); dojo.declare("snapps.widgets.page.field._ckRichText", [quickr.widgets.page.field._ckRichText],

Then the rest of the code remains standard until the end where we add the following:

dojo.declare("snapps.widgets.page.field.ckRichText", [snapps.widgets.page.field._ckRichText], { } );

So now we've told Quickr to a) use our ckEditor.js file, and b) consume our qrdconfig.js file, all we have left is to tell the widget registry it all exists. So we use the widget registry to force it to load the copy whenever it encounters the instruction to load the original. Add the following code to widgetRegistryConfig_ext.js (remember it was blank before):

{ registerWidgets: [ { type: 'REGISTERMODULEPATH', name: "snapps", path: "/snapps" }, { type: 'GLOBALREPLACE', source: "quickr.widgets.page.field.ckRichText", use: "snapps.widgets.page.field.ckRichText" } ] }

The GLOBALREPLACE type is what does all the magic.

Interestingly, a module path can be an actual path (like the \snapps one we added under html) or it can even be a Domino database to make widgets portable and replicable over clusters

-=-=-=-=-

Enjoy!

How To Drag-N-Drop Files in Quickr 8.5

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During Lotusphere #ls11 , and the days after, I've heard the same question a couple of times: what can we done to easily allow files to be drag-n-dropped into a place. This was doable in 8.2 if you were using Internet Explorer since we had an ActiveX control. The ActiveX control allowed you to easily drag-n-drop files from your Windows computer into a place in a snap.
The control, however, had some performance issues and it was highly requested by a vast number of customers that we remove it. In 8.5 we removed the control and we finally were able to build a UI that worked and behaved the same in all browsers that we supported. Our expectation was that most customers would simply use the connectors (which I heard is how 95% of people use Quickr) to achieve this same functionality.
Some customers, however, are wondering how can they get this functionality back. One of our developers from our Dublin lab has documented how to do this in the Quickr Wiki so that you can re-add this capability to Quickr 8.5 as shown below:

Once you follow the instructions, you will have a Java applet which will let you drag-n-drop files into Quickr. As an added bonus, because it's Java, it should work cross-platform. If you need this capability, simply follow the step-by-step instructions here.
Enjoy!

3M Goes Social and Viral

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As I was catching up on the news over the weekend, I came onto this one that I thought was very cool!

Inspired by the Shorewood Lib Dub video (with over 1.4 million views), back in October 3M employees (3Mers) from all over the world published a video they created on their own time. The video spread virally internally and it was posted to YouTube yesterday.

What's really cool about this is that 3M, well, let me quote them:

We relied on internal social media tools, specifically Lotus Connections and an internally-developed video sharing tool called 3M DIY Video Library. Connections’ Communities allowed for private discussion and debate. Connections’ Wiki managed group documents for project plans, team pages, storyboards and music strategy. There was a private community blog for announcements, status updates and weekly newsletters. Teams uploaded drafts of their video segments for comment (and praise) from the other teams to the video library.

Most of the employees in the video had never created a video and had never used Connections in the past. They all did this on their spare time, sometimes over holidays or vacation. Here's the video that has delighted 3M employees and executives:

I also liked how they recruited volunteers, they sent an anonymous invitation with as little information as possible: "Will you join us?". 75 employees from US, Poland, Russia, Italy, Dubai, Singapore and other countries accepted. Most employees didn't know each other, have never met, and probably never will. Isn't that awesome!!??!! (Note: I was also happy that Puerto Rico was represented in the video :) )

Congratulations to the 3M team!

To read more about this project and see the whole story behind this, see this post.

Social Software and Internal Communications - A Perfect Match!

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It recently came to my attention an article that was posted on how IBM Internal communications at shifting from creation to curation. The article describes how IBM employees have adopted social software inside the firewall (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, file-sharing, etc) and overwhelm the content created by the professional communicators.

As you may know, IBM has taken a de-centralized approach for participation in external social media. That's why you don't see a single @IBM account over at Twitter, instead there are thousands of employees tweeting on IBM's behalf and driving the conversations. As mentioned in the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, this model is not about mass communications, but rather masses of communicators. And this model works according to this article from the Social Media Examiner.

This de-centralized model is also used inside the firewall. IBM's internal communications staff leverages the content produced in IBM's internal social software platform (which happens to be Lotus Connections). And this has brought the company closer together -- more connected. Metrics show that general articles intended for companywide consumption get little traffic because they lack relevance. And who knows what's relevant? The employees, of course. That's one reason traffic is up on IBM's intranet thanks to all the employee-created content.

Here's a video that shows IBM's Vice President of Digital Strategy and Development, Ben Edwards, on this topic. I did find it interesting that they showcase the majority of intranets as putting people last... the anti-social intranet, if you will:

Hear more from Ben Edwards on IBM's intranet and the role of content curation.

So if you manage your company's intranet, have you thought of socializing it to drive more traffic to it? As I work with various customers in all types of industries, I hear often that they've spent a lot of money in building an intranet, but are having tons of challenges getting employees to visit the intranet. CEMEX, for example, had that problem and they recently decided to socialize their intranet and provoke a shift in their employee culture.

When I talk to customers I also hear that the concept of socializing the intranet, however, often brings a fear to the internal communicators of losing control... or even losing importance. As a person who manages the intranet, you may fear your job becomes less important, less significant. I like and agree how Ben Edwards think it's the contrary. Your job shifts into becoming the adviser to others, the go-to SME (subject matter expert). You also become a sort of museum curator where you pick the best of the best. And this is huge, because employees could be overwhelmed with all the content that's being created. The internal communications professional can curate the content and pick the content that would be most relevant to others, thereby significantly adding value to the intranet.

Do you agree?

The Lotus Connections 3.0 Reviewer's Guide is Ready for Download

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With the impending release of Lotus Connections 3.0, there are tons of educational materials being released. Yesterday, I showed you all the new videos that have been made available. These videos are geared towards the end user and those are what they are going to see the first time they enter the platform.

Also this week, as you may have seen in the Connections Blog and Synch.rono.us, the Lotus Connections 3.0 Reviewer's Guide was released. This Reviewer's Guide provides an extensive overview of Lotus Connections 3.0 and its nine modules: Home, Profiles, Activities, Blogs, Bookmarks, Communities, Files, Forums, and Wikis. In addition, this guide explains how to extend the features and functions of Lotus Connections to your existing applications (for example Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, etc). If you ever have a question about how a particular feature works, you can find the answer here.

You can read it here, download, print, or even view it in full screen!

Lotus Connections 3 Reviewers Guide

Enjoy!

IBM Makes Office Productivity Suites Go Social!

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IBM has just released their latest version of Lotus Symphony, their free award-winning office productivity suite built on top of Eclipse and OpenOffice.

And Symphony even becomes social thanks to the free plugins that are available. First, there's a plugin to generate an organizational chart based on the information coming from the Profiles service.

Additionally, if you are using LotusLive Connections, there's a plugin to allow you to easily open, edit, and publish files to/from LotusLive directly from Lotus Symphony.

If you have SharePoint internally, there's a plugin for that as well! Or even better than SharePoint, if you are using Lotus Quickr, there's a plugin that lets you check-in/check-out, edit documents, upload documents, integrates with your ECM, and even works with your established workflow patterns.

Another plugin you might be interested in is the Wiki editor plugin. This plugin allows you to create documents in Lotus Connections and convert them into a Lotus Connections Wiki or Confluence Wiki. Need an offline wiki editor? This is the plugin for you!

If you are using MediaWiki, there's also a plugin for that.

If you are interested in calculating how much money you would save by dumping Microsoft Office and switching to Lotus Symphony, check out the calculator here. And if that's not enough to convince you, you could still download the social plugins from IBM for Microsoft Office.

You are convinced, right? Then go ahead and download this plug-in to batch convert all your Microsoft Office files into OpenOffice format and start enjoying the power of FREE!

Version 3 of Lotus Symphony is available Windows, Mac, SUSE Linux, RedHat, and Ubuntu and can be downloaded from here.

How To Embed MP3 in IBM Connections Wiki/Blog

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Recently, I got a question from a colleague wondering how to embed a podcast into a Lotus Connections Blog (or Wiki for that matter). The idea is that readers can listen to the podcast w/out having to download it first to the desktop.

It occurred to me that this may be something that others are wondering about how to do as well. Therefore, I've decided to share the instructions with you.

Updated 29/Jul/2013: This depended on Google Reader which is now sunset.

Here's how you do it:

1. Upload the MP3 file to IBM Connections
2. Go to the Blog / Wiki you are editing
3. Switch over to the HTML view
4. Paste the following code where you would like to embed the MP3/podcast
   
   <iframe frameborder="0" height="53" src="http://loop.ly/s?url=MP3_FILE_URL" width="285"></iframe>
   
   
5. To get the URL of the file, right-click on the 'Download now' link and select Copy Shortcut or Copy Link and then replace it where it says: MP3_FILE_URL.
6. Save the Blog / Wiki

You'll notice that these instructions are pretty similar to what's found here. I used that blog entry and adapted the instructions for IBM Connections, but those instructions pretty much work for any blog/wiki system.

In fact, I've embedded my recent SocialBizUG podcast here:


If you wan to customize the player, go to http://loop.ly and follow the instructions.

Enjoy!

Download Now: Lotus Connections iPhone App

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Update 23/Jul/2014: The latest iOS app for IBM Connections is available in the App Store here.

-=-=-=

Last Wednesday IBM released its first native iPhone app for the Lotus Connections instance of myDeveloperWorks. And there's tons of things you can do in it. I haven't been able to figure out how to effectively capture a movie/demo from my iPhone, so here's what you can do today with this iPhone app:

• View the public and your personal activity stream
• View your activity stream which includes:
• • New blog entries
  • New blog comments
  • New Downloads
  • Profile updates
  • Forum posts
  • Wiki updates
  • Shared files
  • Group/Community activity
  • Board updates
• The activity stream can be filtered by module (e.g. only show updates from Wikis).
• Navigate someone's profile view their status updates and interest/skills
• Search for people, content
• Search using name, keyword, tags
• Edit your Profile
• View saved items
• View your status
• View your network

I would say that this is a pretty nice v1 release. It's been out in the wild for 5 days and I'm hearing some very positive feedback!

To download the free application (which is supported on iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad), click here and to stay up-to-date with all news around myDeveloperWorks subscribe to Bob Leah's blog (The Social Strategist) here.
Enjoy!

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!

New Lotus Connections 2.5 Plug-Ins Available for Free Download

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Today, new plug-ins were made available in the Lotus Connections Solution Catalog for Lotus Connections 2.5+. As just announced by Mac Guidera, some are updates to previous plugins, and some are new like the Sharepoint plugin. As before, they are free so go ahead and download them:

• Plugin for Confluence (update)
• Plugin for Quickr (update)
• Portlet for Activities, Blogs, and Profiles (new!)
• Plugin for Microsoft Sharepoint (new!)
• Plugin for Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook and Windows Explorer (update)

Enjoy!