Socialize Me

Update your status in Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn and others from Lotus Connections via ping.fm

2009-07-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

Back in May, I told you about how I had created a custom plugin to update your Lotus Connections status from ping.fm. After reading your comments and the ones left in my internal blog, I decided there had to be a different approach. That's when I modified an existing Adobe AIR application to microblog both in Twitter and Lotus Connections from the same place. That microblogging application has taken off inside IBM and I can see a LOT of IBMers are using it.. (I can tell because I see RT's from Twitter in Lotus Connections and vice versa).

Talking to one of my favorite customers, they still had a need to just update their status in multiple sites from a single place. Brainstorming some more with them we agreed that a good approach would be create a widget that simply pushes the status update to Lotus Connections and ping.fm at the same time.

So off I went and created a new iWidget for Lotus Connections.

When placed in the Lotus Connections homepage (or wherever an iWidget can live), end users can very easily update their status in Lotus Connections and in ping.fm, which would in turn update the status in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the other sites that the end user has configured.

Very cool, huh? The widget can be installed just like any other widget. The only extra step that you need to do is configure the AJAX proxy:

Go to: <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/config\cells\<cellname>\LotusConnections-config
Save a copy of proxy-config.tpl
Open proxy-config.tpl with your favorite text editor
Look for the following line:

Just after that line insert the following code

<proxy:policy url="http://api.ping.fm/*" acf="none">
 <proxy:actions>
  <proxy:method>GET</proxy:method>
  <proxy:method>POST</proxy:method>
 </proxy:actions>
 <proxy:headers>
  <proxy:header>User-Agent</proxy:header>
  <proxy:header>Accept.*</proxy:header>
  <proxy:header>Content.*</proxy:header>
  <proxy:header>Authorization.*</proxy:header>
 </proxy:headers>
 <proxy:cookies>
  <proxy:cookie>JSESSIONID</proxy:cookie>
 </proxy:cookies>
</proxy:policy>

Save and close the file
Restart the Lotus Connections homepage

And that's it! The widget URL is http://blog.lbenitez.com/widgets/ping.fm/pingFmWidget.xml or if you want to download it and host it locally on your server, you can do so from here.

Enjoy!
PS. I've only tested the widget in the Lotus Connections 2.5 homepage.

Using Social Software to Market Yourself Inside and Outside the Firewall

2009-07-06T08:00:00.001-04:00

I recently found this presentation created and shared internally by my colleague Ian McNairn, Program Director Web Innovation & Technology. In this "short" 45-slide presentation, Ian walks through why we need to use social tools (hint: partly in part to low trust in advertising), problems and risks of social software, and best practices for marketing 2.0.

Ian also shares some stats on IBM social software adoption inside of the firewall. I truly believe one of the business value for Enterprise 2.0 is the ability to easily re-use intellectual capital (and reduce costs from reinventing the wheel). Therefore, I actually used parts of this presentation recently as part of my presentation to the local SMB organization on how to use Twitter and Blogs to generate more revenue.

Using Social Software to Market yourself - inside and outside the firewall

View more presentations from Ian Mcnairn.

Enjoy!

Embracing Social Media To Win Customer "Mindshare"

2009-07-02T08:00:00.001-04:00

A colleague sent me a link yesterday to a report recently released by Social Media Academy titled: Mindshare Report. The report, generated by students of the Academy, used publicly available data available on the social web to analyze the social media status of global enterprises such as: Dow Chemical, New York Life, Toyota, and Vodafone.

The report outlines how social media is used by businesses in all industries, but also that it poses a significant threat to companies who do not understand how publicly available information can be used by their competitors to create devastating effects. Specifically, it demonstrates how a couple of social media savvy consultants can compromise a global enterprise based on publicly available data. For example, it highlights how a Twitter user commented recently: "Yes, we are moving to 21 acre farm and looking for a tractor. A used John Deere would be ideal I think. What do you think?". This is a great opportunity to service these users, otherwise, the competition surely will.

You may remember my blog entry When I Use Twitter, IBM Wins... where I told my story on how I use Twitter to pick out prospective customers and provide some customer support for existing ones. I believe this is something that all companies must do, or they risk losing customers.

Go ahead and read the Mindshare Report from the Social Media Academy. If your company is not engaged yet on the social web, take a peek at the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, which outline the rules that all IBMers must abide by when using social software (in and outside of IBM).

GigaOM ranks Lotus Connections #1

2009-07-01T08:36:00.000-04:00

Last month a blog entry from one of the vendors in the social media space came into my feed reader because I subscribe to everything the world is saying about Lotus Connections. In it, Lotus Connections is called the "Big Daddy of enterprise collaboration software". And being the Red Sox fan that I am, I don't mind being called Big Papi..

But the blog entry was really about a report recently released report by GigaOM called Social Media in the Enterprise. The report is authored by Rachel Happe, Principal & Co-founder of The Community Roundtable. According to the blog entry, Lotus Connections is ranked #1 in Strategic Potential for Enterprise Social Software and KickApps is ranked #2.

Rachel adds in the blog entry:

Even within the leaderboard, solution providers in this market have some pronounced differences, and depending on the model and needs of a particular customer, their short list will look different, despite having similar end-user feature sets.

The Social Media in the Enterprise report is available for download. Unfortunately, I didn't get to meet Rachel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week in Boston, but hopefully next time (actually there was a LOT of people that I didn't get to meet, and those that I did, I barely spent 5-10 minutes talking to them... but I digress)

Congratulations to the Lotus Connections team and I'm looking forward to more analyst reports (specially given all the cool new things that we are working on... shhh!)

Lotus Connections 2.5 Demo on Enterprise2.0 TV

2009-06-23T22:43:00.000-04:00

Suzanne Minassian was interviewed earlier today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. In this 16 minute interview she tells us about IBM research and goes through a demo of Lotus Connections 2.5 (already running internally at IBM). Here's a preview of what Suzanne walks through:

LinkedIn integration announced at Lotusphere
New iPhone interface available for Lotus Connections (which also works on Symbian devices)
New Files component
New Homepage layout

As you watch the interview and see the demo, you'll see my name in various places. Points to whoever can count the number of times I come up .

Bluto was not shown during the demo, but Suzanne briefly talks about the Twitter and Lotus Connections integration.

Enjoy!

Alias and Anonymous Comments in Blogs

2009-06-22T10:13:00.001-04:00

Recently, I was at a customer who wanted to implement our blogging solution for their internal knowledge workers. They had some interesting requirements in terms of how users could comment and moderate blog entries.

The use case required the system to allow a central group to moderate blog entries before they get formally published. Additionally, blog authors could have the power to specify whether or not comments would be forced to anonymous. If comments were not forced to be anonymous, then users could comment using their real name or an alias.

Here's how the proposed solution looks like:

Blogs Anonymous

View more PDF documents from Luis Benitez.

I am bit concerned with all this moderation and 'secret identities', especially around adoption. And it makes me wonder... how many organizations have deployed an internal blogging solution that allow interacting with the solution with secret identities ?

Pre-Order: Planning and Implementing Social Software for your Enterprise

2009-06-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

Thinking about turning your enterprise into Enterprise 2.0 ? Amazon.com has already listed the new book coming from IBM Press titled: Planning and Implementing Social Software for your Enterprise. The book was co-authored by many of my colleagues:

Stephen Hardison, an IBM Certified I/T Specialist with IBM Software Services for Lotus, designs, implements, operates, and assesses large collaborative Lotus Connections solutions.
David Brooks is a key contributor to the IBM Lotus Connections Technical Leadership team.
David Byrd, an IBM Senior Certified Executive IT Architect with IBM Software Services for Lotus.
Gary Wood, Field Support Engineer with Lotus Field Support Services (FSS), has been responsible for troubleshooting some of the world's largest Notes/Domino environments.
Saurabh Calla, Advisory IT Specialist with IBM Software Services, builds applications for Lotus Connections.
Tim Speed is an IBM Certified Systems Architect with IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL) and is responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting various client engagements.
Michael Martin is a certified Senior Managing Consultant in the Messaging & Collaboration Practice for IBM's Software Services for Lotus (ISSL) group focusing on organizational development, change management and social software adoption.
Suzanne O Minassian has held a variety of roles within software development, including development, design, user research, and is currently the product manager for Lotus Connections.

I was one of the Technical Reviewers for the book, so if you like it, I get all the credit. If you don't, then bring it up with the authors!

Kidding aside, I think this book is pretty complete and covers both business and technical issues, and present IBM's proven, best-practices methodology for successful implementation. Here's an excerpt from Amazon's description:

The authors begin by helping managers and technical professionals identify opportunities to use social networking for competitive advantage -- and by explaining how Lotus Connections places full-fledged social networking tools at their fingertips. IBM Lotus Connections carefully describes each component of the product - including profiles, activities, blogs, communities, easy "dogear" bookmarking, personal home pages, and more. The book contains practical coverage of administering Lotus Connections, as well as detailed guidance of integrating and extending Lotus Connections - including a full chapter on plug-ins and widgets, and another on Lotus Connections' REST-based API, which provides full, secure access to Lotus Connections features and data.

Amazon is also offering a 13% discount if you pre-order now.

This Is Why It's So Hard To Calculate Social Software ROI

2009-06-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

Captain's log... June 16th: It was a hot night outside in the Dallas/Fort Worth area; I was working diligently in my hotel room. I was doing a dry run for a very important demo that I had to do in 9 hours. I wanted to verify everything was set. As I prepared my laptop bag, I noticed the unthinkable. The VGA adapter that I need to use to project from my MacBook Pro was not there. I had left it at home, 2100 miles away.

I scrambled. I sent text messages, emails, and BlackBerry Instant Messages to some colleagues that lived in the area and I knew had Macs. Only 1 responded but didn't have the adapter with them. It was now 1am, and with no solution in sight, I renounced and just figured that the customer would have to gather around me and watch the demo in my laptop. Very unprofessional.

Because I was so nervous, I woke up at 5am, 4 hours before my demo. I took a chance and posted a new discussion thread in the Mac@IBM community to see whether anybody in the DFW area had a VGA adapter I could borrow. Here's the timeline:

5am: Discussion topic posted in the Mac@IBM community's forum
5:45am: IBMer working out in the local Y gets a notification in his BB (I didn't know this until after the fact)
7:10am: I go down to get breakfast in hotel lobby -- heart pounding: "we are going to lose this deal because of me"
7:18am: I get an email saying I have a response to my discussion topic. It's from a colleague who has the adapter and lives 4 miles away from the customer and gives me his cell phone number, and home address.
7:20am: I leave the hotel to go to my colleague's house.
7:48am: Arrive at colleague's house and pick up VGA adapter
8:00am: Arrive at customer site
9-11am: I successfully delivered my custom demo to the customer. Overwhelmingly positive feedback from customer.
11:30am: I returned adapter to colleague
12:00pm: Arrived DFW for my flight back to SJU

The great thing about this, was that this is a colleague that I had collaborated with in the past via email and instant messages. So we knew each other. Yet, we had never met in person and I had no idea that he (1) lived in the DFW area and (2) had a MacBook Pro.

Honestly, I'm still in awe. Social software came to the rescue even when all the other traditional methods had failed. If I hadn't posted that discussion topic, the 13 people that were in the conference room where I presented would have had to gather around my laptop to watch the demo.

When I told this story to my wife, all she said was: "You lucky ......".

How do you calculate the ROI of this scenario???

Upcoming Talk: Using Twitter and Blogs To Generate More Revenue

2009-06-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

I was recently invited by the Small Business Association of Puerto Rico (Asociación de Pequeñas Y Medianas Empresas / ASOPYMES) to give a talk on Using Twitter and Blogs To Generate More Revenue. I believe I'm very passionate with this topic, and I am very excited to get this opportunity to share some of my success stories with the local community. Here are the details for the event:

What: Using Twitter and Blogs To Generate More Revenue

Where: Universidad del Este - Carolina

When: June 18th, 6-8pm

Why: To share with the SMB community how they can use Social Media as an effective marketing tool that could eventually help them increase revenue.

How: Lucilla Feliciano and (yours truly) Luis Benitez will be moderating

As you may know, I use Twitter and Blogs about 95% for business. I'm going to rely on a previous blog entry for most of my content: Business Value of Social Software for SMB. Additionally, I'm also going to share how to effectively use Twitter to be more innovative and tend to the needs of your customers. And of course, I'll share the very powerful story of how IBM wins when I use Twitter.

So if you are in the area, mark your calendars and I hope to see you and meet you there.

New Quickr Desktop Application for Windows/Linux/Mac

2009-06-12T13:31:00.000-04:00

This is way cool! Rob Novak, aka Lotus Rock Star, just released a new Adobe AIR-based app for you to easily access all Quickr places from your desktop without ever needing to open a browser (well, except to download Rob's new app ). I've been using the app now for about a week and I really like it a lot (specially since I'm on a Mac and I didn't have a "Quickr connector" available to me).

And you know me.. anything that lets me use my applications without a browser, gets my love.

So go ahead and download your PandaBear now and accelerate your collaboration speed! Now I'm just hoping that this can be updated to work with the personal file sharing component of Lotus Connections. Have a great weekend!

Enjoy!

Collaboration Matters Podcast - The Twins Go At It!

2009-06-11T10:04:00.001-04:00

And now for the English version (a spanish version of the podcast review is available here)! A while back, I participated in a podcast recording with my 'twin brother' Luis Suarez , and Stuart McIntyre and Neil Burston, IBM business partners who run the Collaboration Matters blog. In this podcast we tackle our favorite topic social software and enterprise 2.0.

Here's a quick timeline of the podcast:

1:00 - Welcome

1:20 - Review of Connectr session (stuartmcintyre)

4:50 - Microsoft spies and integration (lbenitez)

7:50 - Status of social software in the enterprise (elsua)

10:50 - Nurturing internal communities (elsua)

14;25 - Embedding social software into existing processes (elsua)

18:20 - Who drives social software adoption in an organization? (elsua)

20:30 - Social Software only requires viral adoption ? (lbenitez)

22:00 - "If one fails, we all fail" - (elsua)

24:30 - Integrating one off solutions (lbenitez)

26:50 - Lessons learned (stuartmcintyre)

28:55 - Closing

You can download the podcast directly from this blog entry, or better yet, subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Los Gemelos Atacan - Podcast de Collaboration Matters

2009-06-11T09:12:00.001-04:00

Hace un tiempo grabé un podcast con Luis Suarez (mi 'gemelo' dentro de IBM desde Gran Canaria) y Stuart McIntyre y Neil Burston que son business partners y corren el blog el llamado Collaboration Matters. En este podcast tomamos nuestro tema favorito: el software social! Hablamos un poco de como el software social nos ayuda a colaborar desde Puerto Rico hasta Gran Canarias. Además, discustimos como estas herramientas de software social hacen que la colaboración presencial fluya mucho mejor ya que se ha desarrollado un nivel de confianza.

Aqui hay un resumen de la

1:00 - Bienvenida

1:50 - Actividades destacadas de Lotus conference (elsua)

4:50 - Adopción de software social dentro de las empresas (elsua)

7:40 - Actividades destacadas (lbenitez)

9:40 - Retos de software social y Enterprise 2.0 para el 2009 (lbenitez)

11:20 - Ya social software es 'mainstream' dentro de las empresas (lbenitez)

11:50 - Un año sin e-mail, ¿como te ha ido? (elsua)

14:30 - ¿Qué haríamos sin Twitter? (elsua)

19:40 - ¿Cómo construir comunidades virtuales? (lbenitez)

24:10 - Cierre

Para saber quien es 'elsua', busquen el acento español y para saber quien soy yo, busquen el acento puertorriqueño. El podcast lo pueden bajar directamente desde este blog. Y si están interesados en subscribirse al podcast, lo pueden hacer aquí.

Al final del podcast escuchan referencia a otro podcast que hicimos en inglés. Para mas información, de ese podcast, pueden ir aquí (o vean mi próximo blog).

IBM Sessions at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

2009-06-10T14:12:00.001-04:00

The Enterprise 2.0 conference is just around the corner (2 weeks away) and I thought it might be a good time to share with you IBM's plans for this year's conference. This blog owes a majority of its readership to the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year. After I reported on the Microsoft / IBM face-off, I got a lot of new readers and subscribers.

This year IBM is a Diamond sponsor for the conference, and that means that they'll be everywhere! Very timely, Stephen Londergan just published a summary of all the sessions and events where IBM will be participating during the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in The Collaboration Soapbox blog.

In Steve's blog entry, you'll find not only a summary of all the sessions where IBM will be at, but also, all the Twitter hashtags that you can use to follow live the comments from the audience. For example, if you want to follow the live Twitter stream during Jeff Schick's session, subscribe to this feed: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23e2conf48

I counted a total of 13 sessions. I would like to know, which one are you attending? Or which one do you recommend ?

Again, if you are going, hope you can make them all. Here's the list of sessions to attend.

Enjoy!

Recap from IBM's Smarter Planet Event in Puerto Rico

2009-06-10T12:34:00.001-04:00

As I announced two weeks ago, yesterday was the local IBM Smarter Planet event in Puerto Rico. The attendance at the activity was very good and it included business partners, (potential) customers, and representatives from the government of Puerto Rico. In fact, Juan Eugenio Rodriguez de Hostos, the newly appointed CIO for the government of Puerto Rico, was one of the speakers there. He talked about Puerto Rico's effort to move towards Government 2.0. The new CIO office (created just 5 months ago) has the following goals:

Create an electronic Puerto Rico with virtual education and tele health
Make more gov services avail to our citizens 24/7/365 via any interface: phone, web, mobile, face-2-face, etc
Deploy systems to improve cost efficiency of intra government transactions
Ensure privacy and protection of citizen information by relying on digital signatures and security standards

IBM's Chief Economist, Dr. Philip Swan, was also at the event. He talked about the current state of the economy and showed us a bunch of data that he says scientifically prove that the economy is about to turn around within a month or so. I sure hope so!

At the event, I was tasked to present on Smarter Work: Collaboration Approaches for a Connected World. I don't have much slideware to share since it was mostly a demo and my own personal stories of collaboration successes. I find that a demo is often more effective than conceptual slideware that don't show anything.

I think the presentation was well received by the attendees. I constantly saw heads nodding (hopefully in agreement, maybe because they wanted me to speed up and get it over with.. ). One attendee said it was the best session, and another said that I can't hide the passion that I have for this stuff. That caught me by surprise... I guess I like this stuff too much.

One thing that I still need to figure out is how to compress an effective demo in 20-25 minutes. Right now, I'm wishing that every time I demo our collaboration solutions I would have 3 hours to show all the cool stuff we have.

Puerto Rico Startup Weekend

2009-06-08T16:36:00.001-04:00

This past weekend was the first Puerto Rico Startup Weekend. You may have caught my live tweets from the event. I had never been to one of those events before and it was great to meet other forward thinkers from the area. I was actually impressed by the number of awesome programmers that turned out for the event. 4-5 ideas were generated from the event and I actually joined one of the teams.

The idea of Startup Weekend is to try and launch a company during the weekend. While I don't think any company decided to incorporate, the team I joined already has a website set up to help us gather some data. In fact, now that you are reading this we are looking for fluent English and/or Spanish speakers to help us rate some words. I would really appreciate it if you could spend some time rating some words once you are finished here. I can't tell you much yet about the purpose of it, but you'll know soon (and no, it's nothing that competes against IBM ).

One of my biggest challenges was getting up to speed with the code. All the developers were PHP/MySQL gurus. That's an area that I'm just learning. Being a huge Eclipse fan, I installed a plugin and set up my PHP development environment on Eclipse on the Mac (BTW, 75-80% of the computers at the event were Macs AND 50% of the PCs crashed at the event, while only 15% of the Macs crashed).

I also set up a MySQL development environment on my Mac following these instructions. The networking that I got to do at the event was great too. It's been a while since I've done some face-to-face "social networking". Oh, and I also got to talk about Lotus Connections and developing rich client applications on the Eclipse/Expeditor framework and get some people excited about that.

In my opinion, the event was great given that it was the first one here. Looking forward to next year's (and stay tuned here to learn more about what we are coding on our free time). More pictures from the event are here.

Microblogging in Lotus Connections with Adobe AIR

2009-06-04T14:51:00.001-04:00

Remember how I blogged about microblogging in Lotus Connections from ping.fm 2-3 weeks ago? Well, I decided to take a different approach and instead develop a microblogging client for Lotus Connections that lets you cross post to various services.

Now, I want to emphasize that this is something that I developed in my own time and is not something officially supported by IBM. In fact, most of the code already existed and all I did was enable it to work with Lotus Connections using its microblogging APIs. Jason Feinstein is the super awesome developer who originally developed Bluto inside IBM. Because I like coding so much, I asked him if it would be possible to get access to the source code with the goal of modifying it to work with Lotus Connections.

He said the source had already been, well, open-sourced and gave me the URL to the IBM internal open source repository. When I got the code, I then had to figure out how to actually code an Adobe AIR application. Turns out that Flex development is very similar to Java so it was a snap to get started. I was disappointed, however, that the SDK for Eclipse actually costs money after 60 days. Thankfully, I was able to make my changes in 2-3 weeks worth .

Anywho, you ready for a demo?

Content Requires Flash Player

My goal is to make this available to the public as soon as Lotus Connections 2.5 out (IBMers check my internal blog for instructions on how to download). What do you think? Do you like it ?

Enjoy!

Advising Your Clients on Web 2.0: International, Privacy & Security Considerations

2009-06-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

Seems like June is the month of the briefings. You may remember that last week I mentioned I'll be doing a collaboration with social software one in Puerto Rico. Yesterday, I told you about Jeff Schick's briefing in New York. Today, I learned about a new briefing that's coming up in a couple of weeks called: Advising Your Clients on Web 2.0: International, Privacy & Security Considerations.

Regardless of you talk about web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, social software, etc, these capabilities are changing the way organizations and individuals communicate, collaborate and promote themselves. Whether you embrace it or simply monitor it, clients need informed legal advice in this fast-changing area.

Speakers from IBM, Kodak, and Bristows will discuss privacy issues around social software, and Enterprise 2.0. I thinks this audiocast will be extremely valuable for those international organizations with presence in Europe. Additionally, it will be of great value for those who:

must provide counsel to clients on the risks of internal or external use of social media, or
have to draft organizational policies to protect intellectual capital (like IBM's Social Computing Guidelines)

Here's an excerpt of the agenda:

Topics to be addressed include:

Legal issues for organizations who operate or market outside of the United States

Special focus on how international data protection regulations apply to social media

Case study: Governance and risk management by leading global brands that have embraced social media

To register for the audio cast, and view more details on the event, go here.

June 10th Briefing in NY with Jeff Schick

2009-06-03T08:54:00.001-04:00

If you are in the New York area on June 10th, you should definitely go to a briefing that's happening next week with Jeff Schick, VP of IBM Social Software. Gemini Systems is hosting this briefing called: Real Customers, Real Impact with Lotus Social Software. Key customers will be participating and sharing their story. If you are still in the fence about Enteprise 2.0 and the benefits of social software inside the firewall, come learn how real businesses are finding tangible benefits from their Social Software and Web 2.0 solutions.

Here's an excerpt from the invitation:

You've heard the hype - now see the real business benefits and find out how Lotus Social Software is making a significant impact.

With IBM Social Software for Business, your organization can empower employees, partners and customers to connect and collaborate. Realize professional and business benefits through faster task implementation and confident decision-making based on vetted expert opinion. Form invaluable global relationships, spurring the creation of innovative products and services that will drive growth for you business.

To register, visit the event's page here. You can also see the full invite here. If you know of others that may benefit from this, spread the word!

And if you are not in New York that week, but perhaps are in Puerto Rico, don't forget to register for my briefing.

Teach For America Demonstrates IBM Social Software

2009-05-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

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:

Teaching and Learning Center: How to avoid re-inventing the wheel by learning from your peers
Career and Leadership Center: How to find professional development advice
Regions and Communities: Get connected with staff, alumni, and corp members
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

2009-05-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

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!

2009-05-26T18:40:00.001-04:00

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

2009-05-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

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:

Configured Ping.fm to add a custom URL (i.e. http://my.ip.address:8080/PingFMLotusConn/ping.fm)
From any ping.fm client, I send a status update
Ping.fm sends an HTTP POST request to the above URL (I had to open a port in my firewall for this to work)
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

2009-05-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

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:

Adds the Lotus Connections person card EVERYWHERE a name appears
Adds a tag cloud web part to surface the global Lotus Connections tag cloud in Sharepoint
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.

Content Requires Flash Player

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.

Use Lotus Mashups To Create Custom Reports for Lotus Connections

2009-05-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

Seems like Lotus Mashups is a popular topic in my blog. You may remember that last week, I introduced you to a wiki article that describes how to create a simple mash-up that leverages the Lotus Connections Profiles Reports-To Chain. Well, today I'm also going to talk about using Lotus Mashups together with Lotus Connections.

You see, recently, I was asked by a customer how to retrieve the total # of active users in Lotus Connections at any given time. Out of the box, Lotus Connections ships with a set of reports that displays this data. The reports, however, may not meet everyone's need. Of course, the reports can be customized as needed but some code is required.

Enter Lotus Mashups. Torsten Hoffman describes very nicely how to create a custom report for Lotus Connections without writing any code with the assistance of Lotus Mashups.

Very nicely done, Torsten!

More Lotus Connections Widgets Available

2009-05-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'm often asked what our customers are doing in terms of adding widgets to the Lotus Connections Homepage. By now, you are probably familiar with the Lotus Connections widget catalog that I'm hosting. That catalog should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of integration our customers are doing. And as you'll see the possibilities are endless.

Today, I got notice that one of the Lotus Connections v2.5 Beta Partners, Eniac, has also done some work in developing their own widget catalog. As you can see in the screenshot below, Eniac created the following widgets:

Poll/Survey widget
CRM Search widget
My Quickplaces widget
Bulletin Board (News) widget
Calendar widget
etc

Another great thing is that these widgets work cross-platform (i.e. on Portal v6+, Notes v8+, etc). Glad to see others developing around the Lotus Connections platform!