Teach For America Demonstrates IBM Social Software

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Gemini Systems, an IBM business partner, together with ISSL (IBM Software Services for Lotus) have been working with the Teach For America organization. Specifically, ISSL and Gemini have been helping Teach for America deploy an extranet portal with the Connections and Quickr capabilities very nicely integrated with each other.

One of the things that I really like about this particular demo is that you can't really tell what's Portal, what's Quickr, and what's Connections. As you know, I'm a big advocate for integration. I truly believe that the best route to success with social software is by embedding social software directly into existing applications and processes.

The demo site is divided into various categories:

1. Teaching and Learning Center: How to avoid re-inventing the wheel by learning from your peers
2. Career and Leadership Center: How to find professional development advice
3. Regions and Communities: Get connected with staff, alumni, and corp members
4. Giving and Volunteering: Easily find giving and volunteering activities

To view the demo, check out Teach For America's tour.

Note: updated on 10/Jun/09 to include reference to ISSL.

Free Puerto Rico Leadership Forum

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In two weeks, I'm going to be presenting at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico at IBM's Free City Tour of Building a Smarter Planet. The event takes place on June 9th and is open to the public. Here are the details for the event:

My session is called "Smarter Work: Collaboration Approaches for a Connected World". I'll be talking about how to embed collaboration and social software into existing processes to improve efficiency, and reduce costs from by improving productivity in the workplace.

If you want to register for this FREE event, sign up here before June 1st. See you there!

Time to get back to business!

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I just got back from a week vacation (10 day total including the two weekends) and I feel energized. I got a chance to spend some time with my family in a local resort down here and celebrate my birthday. The vacation was mostly free thanks to all the hotel points I have accumulated over the past several months. And because I'm such a road warrior, I got this great birthday gift.

My favorite part of the vacation would definitely have to be spending time at the beach with the baby. While he had already been to the beach before, we were only there for no more than 20 minutes the first time (it was for our holiday photo shoot). I've been meaning to take the baby back to the beach, but weather has just not cooperated. And it was actually starting to bother me that a baby born in Puerto Rico had not gone to the beach yet (he's almost 15 months now...)!

Anyway, I'm happy to report that he LOVED the beach. He did tons of exercise by walking the entire beach and learning how to balance himself in the sand. He also LOVED getting buried by daddy. I wasn't sure how he was going to react to the sand on top of him. However, from the very first attempt I did at burying him, he was cracking up at the fact that the sand made his body "disappear".

For dinner, we dressed up the baby and he didn't look like a baby at all. He looked like a grown up. They grow up so fast, don't they?

Alright, now it's time to get back to business!

Oh Yeah! Update Your Lotus Connections Status From Ping.FM

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Twitter drives innovation...

If you are actively using social networks, you've probably heard of ping.fm. Ping.fm allows users to update their status in the following services from any of the following clients:

From:		To:
Skype SMS E-mail AOL Instant Messenger Yahoo Messenger MSN Messenger GTalk etc		Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Identi.ca Flickr FriendFeed etc...

So from a single place you can update all of your statuses. And you can do this from different places. You are NOT forced to go to ping.fm's website to update your status. Ping.fm can receive status updates from various sources and then send them to your sites.

Pretty cool, huh? Well, I saw a tweet suggesting that updating your Lotus Connections status from ping.fm would be valuable too. Wouldn't it be cool if we could update Lotus Connections status from SMS, Skype, AOL, and other !?! I agreed and took the challenge upon myself.

The code gets done...

The code was actually pretty simple to code up and test (~3 hrs). So how did I do this? Here's the flow:

1. Configured Ping.fm to add a custom URL (i.e. http://my.ip.address:8080/PingFMLotusConn/ping.fm)
2. From any ping.fm client, I send a status update
3. Ping.fm sends an HTTP POST request to the above URL (I had to open a port in my firewall for this to work)
4. My custom web application, in turn, uses the Lotus Connections Atom API to update my status

I tested this and it works like a charm!! That's right.. you can now microblog in Lotus Connections from ping.fm!

Open questions / challenges...

Before releasing the code, I still have one challenge that I have to address. Since ping.fm will send the status update request in behalf of the user, ping.fm needs access to the URL defined above. Therefore, a customer would have to put it in the DMZ or poke a hole in their FW for this to work. The challenge, however, is how do I know the user who's posting the message since ping.fm doesn't send any user information. The ping.fm API is not very detailed and basically they only give me a message, but nothing else.

Let's secure it!

I thought of asking people to hardcode their credentials in the URL, for example: http://my.ip.address:8080/PingFMLotusConn/ping.fm?username=...&password=... (instead of:http://my.ip.address:8080/PingFMLotusConn/ping.fm). However, this is not very secure because you are giving your credentials to ping.fm AND ping.fm would transmit those over the wire in clear text.

My thought right now is to create a Trust Association Interceptor (i.e. lazy man's SSO). This would require that the user include their email address only, not their password, as part of the URL. This has a security hole because anybody could then assume someone else's identity. For example, I can give ping.fm this URL and update Mac Guidera's status: http://my.ip.address:8080/PingFMLotusConn/ping.fm?username=mac_guidera@us.ibm.com. Not very secure.

So I'm thinking that I need to create a widget on the Profiles page that gets deployed by Lotus Connections Admins. This widget would generate a user specific URL (e.g. http://my.ip.address:8080/PingFMLotusConn/ping.fm?authToken=...) where authToken is an encrypted token that uniquely identifies the user (that way users can't assume the identity of others).

If you've read this far... thoughts ?

Demo: Lotus Connections Plugin for Sharepoint

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Earlier this week, the Lotus development team released the beta version of the new Lotus Connections plugin for Microsoft Sharepoint. You may remember that I mentioned this was coming when I did my recap of Lotusphere ealier this year. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you are probably familiar with the integration capabilities of Lotus Connections into Microsoft Sharepoint.

As soon as the plugin was available, and I got some free time, I installed it into a test system to give it a test drive. The installation was pretty straightforward. Basically, you run a wizard that asks you for two parameters: 1) the URL for the Connections Profiles service, and 2) the URL for your Sharepoint site (which was automatically detected for me). Clicking Next a couple more times and 2-3 minutes later the plugin was installed!

The new plugin provides 3 capabilities out of the box:

1. Adds the Lotus Connections person card EVERYWHERE a name appears
2. Adds a tag cloud web part to surface the global Lotus Connections tag cloud in Sharepoint
3. Adds Profiles search mechanism as an additional search engine in Sharepoint

To see these capabilities in action, check out this quick demo that I just recorded.

I'm sure this is going to make a lot of people happy. Connections and Sharepoint integration is a topic that comes up a lot with my customers. I'm also hoping that Mike Gotta, Industry Analyst with the Burton Group, will be happy as well since he was expecting more integration between Connections and Sharepoint earlier this year.