Software Development Is Officially a Social Process

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I have talked a couple of times about socializing the social development process. For a while now, this integration has been available in technology preview mode.

At Lotusphere '11 #ls11 we announced that the integration would be ready for production by Q2 of this year. And it's coming in 7 days!

To get ready, you can watch a replay of a webcast that I announced earlier called Accelerate Software Delivery with Social Software webcast.

The integration will be available natively in Rational Team Concert 3.0.1 which will be available next week (June 14, 2011). The integration consists of:

• Integrated activity stream within Rational Team Concert (RTC)
• Ability to create activities directly from RTC (the activity will have a direct link back to the RTC workspace)
• Ability to create a blog directly from RTC
• Ability to surface the Connections business card directly within RTC
• Search for contacts from RTC
• Update your status and microblog directly from RTC
• Associate an RTC project with a community for direct access to community features (forums, wikis, blogs, etc) from RTC
• Connect RTC User Profiles to Connections Profiles
• and more..

Here's a quick demo that shows some of the integration points:

To learn more, visit the Social page in the Rational Jazz site and check out IBM's official press release here.

If you are already an RTC 3.0 user, you can simply download the connector from here (with source code). And if you are NOT using RTC, you can also download RTC for free from here (3.0.1 Release Candidate 3)

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!

64-bit Quickr Connectors Are Here!

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That's right! The Quickr Connectors that you've been waiting for so long are finally here. And even before they were promised.
You may remember that we were targetting the second half of 2011. However, as Mac Guidera just announced the new Quickr Connectors are now available as of June 6th, 2011 so we were able to beat our commitments and that feels really good!

  Key features of HF7

• Windows 7 64-bit support, including Windows 64-bit Explorer Connector
• Microsoft Office 2010 64-bit Connectors
• Microsoft Outlook 2010 64-bit Connector

Go out and get it:

• [Updated 15/Jun/2011 with new link] Connector: http://www-933.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/swg/quickorder?parent=ibm~Lotus&product=ibm/Lotus/Lotus+Quickr+Connectors&release=8.5&platform=Windows&function=fixId&fixids=8.5.0.1_HF7&includeSupersedes=0&source=fc

Enjoy!

It's Here: Customizing Quickr Domino v8.5

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A while back, I shared with you how I'm working very hard with our team to improve the documentation around Quickr Domino v8.5. This is mainly based on feedback I heard at Lotusphere '11 #ls11.

The team has done a tremendous work in this area. So far the following has been published:

• Step-by-step on how to deploy Quickr 8.5.1
• Best Practices for File and Page migration from Quickr 8.2 to Quickr 8.5.x
• Performance Tuning Guide for Quickr 8.5
• API documentation for Quickr Domino 8.5
• Update Quickr Domino to the latest OneUI
• Creating custom event handlers for Quickr Domino

And today, I'm glad to announce that we have a new whitepaper focused solely on customization based on the new Pages architecture in Quickr Domino 8.5. Here are some of the things you'll find in the whitepaper:

• Anatomy of the Quickr 8.5 theme
• What's new in the Quickr 8.5 for Domino theme
• Creating a custom theme
• Customizing forms
• Customizing widgets
• Migrating customized templates to the 8.5 theme
• Quickr for Domino hooks
• Other customizations

I would like to thank two partners who really helped review the content and make sure it was ready for publication: Snapps and Opus Neo. And of course, thanks again to the development team who's working extra hard to get all this stuff published.

The whitepaper is available in PDF format and you can download it here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/quickrcustomizing/

How To Add Google +1 Button to Blogger

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I just caught the news about Google making available the new +1 Button.

If you want to understand the value of the Google +1 button, here's a quick video that Google put together:

As an end user, I'm still not sure about the value, but as a content publisher it might help my search rankings and make my content more discoverable so I figure I would add it to Connections and my Blogger blogs. (more on Connections in a follow-up post).

Adding the Google +1 button to Blogger is pretty easy. Once you follow these instructions, it'll show up on your page similar to this:

Here's how you get it done:

1. Go to Blogger.com
2. Log in with your account if you haven't yet
3. On your Dashboard, click the Design link for your blog you want to modify
4. Near the top of the page click on Edit HTML
5. Now on top of the text box, click the Expand Widget Templates checkbox
6. Find the line that contains </body>
7. Just before that tag, add the following code:
   
   

   <script src='http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js' type='text/javascript'/>

   
   
8. Now search for post-body and you should find something like this:
   
   

   <div class='post-body entry-content'>

   
   
9. Immediately after that line, add the following code:
   
   

   <div class='post_share social-media'> <div class='wdt_button'> <g:plusone expr:href='data:post.url'/> </div> </div>

10. Now look for .footer-outer { and you should find something like this:
    
    

    .footer-outer { color:$(footer.text.color); background: $(footer.background); ...

    
    
    
11. Just before that line add the following:
    
    

    /* Social share styles ----------------------------------------------- */ .social-media { width: 90px; } .post_share { float:left; } .post_share .wdt_button { clear:left; margin:0; } .wdt_button { padding:5px; }

    
    
    
12. Click Save Template and that should do it.

To see how to add the Twitter and Facebook Like buttons to your Blogger blog, see this post.

Enjoy!