Source Code for Lotus Connections Portlets Now Available

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Mac Guidera, Product Manager for Lotus Connections gave us some wonderful news recently. The Lotus Connections development team has released the source code for their portlets. To recap, the portlets, which you can download from here, provide the following features:

• Create/edit/view Activities
• Create/edit/view Blogs
• Create/edit/view Bookmarks (Dogear)

These portlets were built with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory. By releasing the source code to these portlets, you can now:

• learn how these portlets were built
• built on top of these portlets to create your own functionality
• use it as an example to build your own portlets

Download the source code from here.

Microsoft OCS iWidget for Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal

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Yesterday I told you how Epilio was able to get the Microsoft OCS presence awareness information in the Lotus Connections person card. Well, it turns out that the same company has also created an iWidget which can be deployed to Lotus Connections. That way, directly from the Lotus Connections Homepage, users will be able to communicate with others via Microsoft OCS, even if they don't have the Microsoft OCS client installed!

This integration is very timely because this is something that customers often ask me about. The nice thing about this widget is that since it complies to the iWidget standard, it can also be easily deployed to WebSphere Portal.

Epilio, an IBM Business Partner, has put together another nice video (sans audio) to demonstrate this capability:

You can find the source code and the documentation for this iWidget here.

Enjoy!

Microsoft OCS in Lotus Connections 2.5

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Almost 3 years ago, I was working with a customer who wanted to add instant messaging to Lotus Connections, IBM's Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. As you may suspect, Lotus Connections is integrated out of the box with the IBM instant messaging client, Lotus Sametime. The challenge with the customer is that they were using the Microsoft solution, something called Office Communicator Server (OCS).

Then, I was able to successfully show presence information in Lotus Connections based on Microsoft OCS. And I even documented how to do it in this developerWorks article. One thing that I was never able to do was add the presence information in the business card (the little widget that pops up next to a name).

I'm happy to inform that Epilio has actually done this and has even created a YouTube video (sans audio) to demonstrate the functionality:

Very cool, huh? Update: You can find the source code and the documentation here.

Enjoy!

The Red Cross Launches their Social Network with Lotus Connections

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Today, the Spanish Red Cross announced their go live of World Red Cross (Mundo Cruz Roja in spanish), their social networking site powered by Lotus Connections.

The Red Cross is all about communities helping communities. As such, they felt that a social networking solution would be appropriate for them. After comparing with various vendors, they picked IBM's solution and went live today. The idea is that each community will serve different purposes, but they all have one thing in common: the need to share information amongst its members.

I like how they even created a community so their members can support each other as they learn to use this new social networking site. I think this is a great idea because that way you can reduce your IT and Help Desk support costs. The site has been enabled in 26 languages so pretty much anybody in the world can use it.

Go check it out: http://www.mundocruzroja.org

Easily Search Lotus Connections from Google Chrome

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Lately, I've been using Google Chrome as my default browser to see if I can get used to it. I always considered myself very productive using Firefox, and I've heard so many good things about Chrome that I decided to give it a try. The features that I relied the most on Firefox were the Firebug plugin and searching Lotus Connections directly from the browser. Searching Lotus Connections directly from Firefox was possible thanks to OpenSearch which Lotus Connections supports since v2.5.

Google Chrome comes with a Firebug-like capability already built-in so that was easy. My next priority was setting up Chrome to search Lotus Connections instead of Google ( we all know at this point that Connections is a better search engine than Google, right?). Everywhere I looked, it said that Chrome supports OpenSearch. I couldn't, however, figure out how to add Lotus Connections to Chrome via OpenSearch.

Luckily, there's a way to do it manually (this is how I did it in my Mac. It may be a bit different in Windows):

1. Open Chrome
2. Go to Preferences...
3. Under Basics, you'll see Default Search set to Google. Click on Manage
4. Click on the + sign to add a new search engine
5. Set the Name to Lotus Connections, the Keyword to lc and the URL to https://<hostname>/search/web/search?query=%s (for example: https://w3.ibm.com/connections/search/web/search?query=%s). It should look like this:
   
   
   
   
6. Click Ok
   
7. Optional: Select it and click on Make Default
8. Close the Preferences panel.
   

If you didn't set Lotus Connections as your default search engine, here's what you do. Say you want to search for "enterprise2.0 software". In Chrome's omnibox, type "lc enterprise2.0 software" (w/out the quotes) and press Enter. And voilá, you've now searched Lotus Connections directly from the browser without needing to open Connections first and logging in.

Enjoy!