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!

Calling IBM Social Business Partners

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One of the things that I've been working on in my new role, along with many colleagues, is on a new program for our business partners.

On Friday, IBM started to offer a Social Business Authorization where Business Partners can certify as Social Business partners. I thought this was interesting because the authorization (or certificaions, depending on how you want to call it) is focused more on demonstrated skills than on actual certifications (i.e. passing tests). There is, however, a requirement to pass certain mastery tests.

The authorization also includes offerings from different brands in the IBM portfolio for a complete Social Business offering. The idea is that a partner must know how to work with Connections but also with the complementary offerings from Cognos and/or SPSS.

If you would like to be part of this new authorization, or want to learn about the benefits, you can find out more about in PartnerWorld here. The list of mastery tests is included here.

How To Get The Latest Social Media Counts

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While in Argentina, Marcelo showed this cool dynamic infographic that shows you the latest social media counts in "real-time", in the last day, last week, last month or last year.

Unfortunately, I found out about it after my Social Business presentation. I think it would've been nice to show this to the audience so they get a sense, again in real-time, as to the massive amounts of activities that are going on in the different social networks out there.

There's also an iPad app you can try and download: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/social-media-counts/id392861163?mt=8%20# . You can read more about it here. It looks like this was made available back in January, but I just stumbled upon it. I think I missed it in all the Lotusphere #ls11 rush.

Improved Quickr Documentation Now Online

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Recently, I've been working very closely with the development team to improve the documentation available around Quickr. As a practitioner just before taking on this role I had some ideas on how to improve the documentation. To that end, I met with various customers and business partners at Lotusphere '11 #ls11 and asked for feedback on how to improve the documentation. Today, I'm glad to announce that we have several new documents out there that you may want to check out.

First, there's a new step-by-step guide on how to deploy Quickr. The Quickr 8.5.1 server installation and basic configuration document gives you everything you need along with screenshots to start from 0 and get something up and running as quickly as possible. So if you are new to the Domino world or to Quickr, this document is certainly the one for you. Or if you are thinking of doing a Show-N'-Tell session at Lotusphere, then this is a good one to take screenshots from.

Second, I've asked the team to create a document that outlines the Best Practices for File and Page Migration From Quickr 8.2 to Quickr 8.5. This is in response to feedback that I heard not only at Lotusphere but based on the discussions going on in the Quickr Forum. Hopefully, this will help everyone who's planning a migration from Quickr Domino 8.2 to Quickr Domino 8.5.

Next, the Performance Tuning Guide for Quickr Domino 8.5 has also been made available. This guide should have everything you need to ensure that your server responds as fast as possible.

Fourth, it's now easier to see which languages are supported by Quickr Domino. To see the list of all 28 languages into which we have translated the product, check out the Selecting a different language document.

Finally, the API documentation for Quickr Domino has been updated. I've asked the development team to provide more examples and more documentation on how to use these services so we can get even more developers creating cool stuff for Quickr. Right now, phase 1 of this documentation update and there are 3 more phases which you will see rolled out in the coming days.

And there's one more thing... We are also working on creating a document that outlines the Best Practices for Customizing Quickr Domino. This document should be available very soon. It will contain a lot of examples of customizations that you can do and where you should do these customizations so as you upgrade to future releases of Quickr, you don't have to re-do a lot of the work.

Hope these new documents make your lifes easier and if there's anything else you would like to see, let me know in the comments below.

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:

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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

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Enjoy!