Going to Lotusphere? Tune in to the Lotusphere podcast

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If you are going to Lotusphere on January 17-21, 2010 you MUST subscribe and listen to the Lotusphere podcast. Currently, there have been 6 episodes posted. In each episode, Stuart McIntyre interviews guests and gets them to share their tips and stories on attending Lotusphere.

In episode 5, I join Stuart to share my own view of Lotusphere. Want to know my favorite parts of Lotusphere? My tips on what to do? And what's worth waking up at 6am on Thursday for? Then go on and listen to the podcast now.

Microblogging plugin for Lotus Notes and Lotus Connections

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It's finally here! Super awesome IBMer Jessica Wu Ramirez created a Lotus Notes plugin that basically allows you to update your status and follow conversations that are happening in Lotus Connections directly from your Lotus Notes client. Jessica created this within 24 hours of Lotus Connections 2.5 being out and has been continuously updating the client making it better in every iteration.

The client also lets you update your status in Twitter. And even if Lotus Notes is minimized (or you are not using it at the moment), you can update your status directly through a system tray icon.

So go ahead and download and install this free plugin.

Enjoy!

Updating your Lotus Connections microblog programmatically

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This post is very techie. It comes as a reader recently asked me to share the code that I use to programmatically update my microblog (or status) in Lotus Connections. The following code is using Java and Abdera, but should be easily portable to other platforms like Adobe AIR. The Lotus Connections Profiles API documentation was helpful when I was trying to figure this out.

1. Initialize the Abdera library

   // Initialize the Atom Client to update the status in Connections Abdera abdera = new Abdera(); AbderaClient client = new AbderaClient(abdera); AbderaClient.registerTrustManager(); try { client.addCredentials("http://connections.tap.ibm.com", null, null, new UsernamePasswordCredentials(username, password)); } catch (URISyntaxException e) { e.printStackTrace(); }

2. Create the Atom entry to post to Lotus Connections
   
   
   

   Parser parser = abdera.getParser(); String urlText = "https://connections.tap.ibm.com/profiles/atom/mv/thebuzz/entry/status.do?email=" + username; // Create the Atom entry with the new status message Entry status = abdera.newEntry(); status.addCategory("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/type", "entry", null); status.addCategory("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/message-type", "status", null); message = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(message); status.setContent(message);

   
   
3. Post the Atom entry

   // Send the new status message to Connections ClientResponse response = client.put(urlText, status);

4. Check the return code

   if (response.getType() == ResponseType.SUCCESS) { // yipee System.out.println("woo hoo"); } else { // WTH? System.out.println("oh no!"); }

Hope this helps.

Tri-State LUG: Extending Lotus Connections to Domino with TDI

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As I mentioned last week, on Monday I participated in my first LUG: Lotus User Group. I was cordially invited to participate in the Tri-State Lotus User Group meeting. I could only stay for the morning. I got to enjoy Bob Picciano's keynote before my session. You can find a summary of Bob's keynote in Chris' blog.

My presentation was about using Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) with Lotus Connections and Domino. TDI is a free piece of software that's included with both Lotus Connections and Domino v8+. It's a great toolkit to easily move data from/to Domino to/from Lotus Connections. I used the following presentation to introduce my demo.

While I don't have a formal recording, I do have other blog entries with recordings that show how to use TDI to quickly import data to Lotus Connections. The videos are: How To Load Users from a Spreadsheet and How To Load Photos from LDAP.

Extending Lotus Connections with Domino using TDI

View more presentations from Luis Benitez.

To the first person who asked me a question, I gave away a copy of Web 2.0 and Social Networking for the Enterprise, Joey Bernal's new book which includes a foreword by Jeff Schick, VP of Social Software at IBM. I was one of the technical editors so got two copies and decided to give away my extra one .

Enjoy!

IT Superstar of 2009: Luis Benitez

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Thank you all for your support!

If you want to nominate someone else as the IT Superstart of 2009, go here: http://www.ibm.com/vrm/itsuper_etp_recipient_2250IN/LBenitez194164846