IdoNotes (and sleep)

Lotus Connections isn’t playing nice with others

by Chris Miller at 09:48:46 AM on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

I ran across a posting from Luis Benitez on how the Redwiki residents are showing the integration of Connections with some public social networking systems such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Skype. I thought to myself, they finally got it! Umm, no.

I said this at the Busines Partner Summit as well as at Lotusphere, in person and on here. Lotus should be making built in (read that as it comes with the product out of the box) hooks to draw in already built profile information or provide a widget to show that data. What appears in the wiki is the ability to provide links to their profiles to show in business cards. I don't want my users going out to the other places when building an enterprise social networking solution. I want the data coming to them. I want profiles that my users have built for years on such things as LinkedIn to possibly be brought in. It should match their resume they have internally already anyway right? I want that business skill and knowledge to show when I search. A link does me no good.

There was also a huge stretch in the example:

For the sample actions that integrates with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Skype, we are assuming that the UID in Lotus Connections matches those in the target applications

Since many of these users joined well before Lotus Connections rolled out, the odds of the UID matching are very slim. Allowing the users to enter and securely store their credentials to bring the data over makes sense. Not many companies will modify their LDAP infrastructure to allow it to match seemingly endless possibilities in the way other systems store an attribute like UID.

So how about it? Can we get built in abilities, widgets and scripts to hook to these public sites?

Location: St. Louis, MO

Category: Lotus Connections
Tags :Lotus Connections View blog reactions

1) Lotus Connections isn’t playing nice with others
Created by Luis Benitez at 8/12/2008 12:41:25 PM email | website

Hi Ido,

Thank for the link back! In the example provided, it does rely on uid, but you can certainly use whatever field you want.. just change the field in the link template and voila. Or even if your field is not there, Lotus Connections allows you to add an infinite number of additional fields. You could pick from those fields.

The integration documented in the Wiki is actually something that a customer asked for, but just like you, I've also heard customers wanting to bring data in to the system. As you probably know, we can use widgets to bring data in and you can build these today using Lotus Mashups (there's already a widget for importing RSS feeds)... I've also asked the Wiki developers to build one too.. So an example is just days/weeks away..!! Stay tuned!!

2) re: Lotus Connections isn’t playing nice with others
Created by Chris Miller at 8/12/2008 12:45:29 PM email | website

I thought there was still a limit on the number of fields that could be added? RSS is good but it is static at that point and profiles are meant to be dynamic unless you are parsing RSS streams and changing data. That is why I like the ability to integrate with already built services. Even an import ability to assist in starting Connections off right.

I will keep checking the wiki !

3) Lotus Connections plays nice with others
Created by Erik Sorensen at 8/12/2008 1:14:03 PM email | website

I had a similar issue at a client a while ago... and brought an idea to one of our developers of having an atom-based migration utility. In a couple of days he had a migration tool using the abdera libraries that basically authenticated to a a third party site, retrieved content via feed, and published into connections using ATOM (in our case, it was the need to migrate existing blogs into Connections 1.0.2)

From what I remember, it can be extended to any third party site/service that supports ATOM, since the Connections folks appear to have been very thorough to make sure that anything that can be done in the UI can also be done via ATOM

4) Lotus Connections isn’t playing nice with others
Created by Luis Benitez at 8/12/2008 7:42:31 PM email | website

Nope... The 3 field limit is gone! (Hurray!!)

Facebook, as an example, provides various RSS feeds to bring in a user's timeline and their friends into other applications. But it looks like what you are looking for is a way to synchronize someone's profile in Facebook with their profile in Lotus Connections. Is that right?

If so, we can do this today with TDI (Tivoli Directory Integrator), which is just a tool that ships with Lotus Connections for these purposes. If one of your customers is asking for this, let me know and I'll start working on this. Otherwise, please let me know (via Twitter or my blog, or my Facebook, or... :) ) what you would like to see!

Looking forward hearing more from you..!!

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