Powerful customization available in IBM Connections

Notifications are great, specially on a social platform they help you keep at pace with what is happening on your content. Which is critical for your persona in social space, after all you would like to know what is happening to content you post, is it being liked, commented upon (discussed), shared etc.
One problem with social platforms is that they do not provide sufficient mechanism to control these notifications. There is no way to mention if you would want notifications for a particular event, what kind of notification should that be, would you like to just have details of event like “User A commented on blog you posted” or would you want to have contents of the comment and blog as well.



IBM Connections fortunately is different and provides full capability to administrators for managing notifications and its contents. For this IBM Connections uses a a technology called templates or more popularly knows as Free marker templates. More can be read about templates on
IBM Connections Documentation page : Customizing Notifications
Details of Freemarker can be found here : What is Freemarker

Feel free to edit those template files based on what notifications you want and how you want them. Best of all you do not even need to restart servers if use Freemarker tool.

Getting started with IBM Liberty in your Eclipse in 10 minutes.

A strictly developer’s steps to get started with Liberty and Eclipse development environment. Removing the long documentation, below are the steps that should get you started under 10 minutes.

1. Get the latest eclipse ( Kepler, I used SR2 release )

2. Install Liberty in eclipse
    2.1 Open this url in browser : https://www.ibmdw.net/wasdev/downloads/liberty-profile-using-eclipse/
    2.2 Drag and drop Install icon on this page on your eclipse, that should automatically trigger the install

3. Once this is done and eclipse has been restarted you would need to create a server instance
    3.1 Go to server view and select new server
    3.2 From the options select WebSphere Liberty and then select  install liberty runtime
    3.3 Choose the folder where runtime would be downloaded
    3.4 That should be it wrt liberty.

4. Click on server and select add/remove your web in workspace should show up.

A Nifty little search trick in IBM RAD/Eclipse

If you have worked development team of a large project as IBM RAD or Eclipse as the development, you would know how long it takes to search through tens of projects.

Suppose you are trying to figure out the view or action classes having a specific string that you saw on UI. Now this string could be coming in from a json, xml, java, jsp and the list goes on and on. What increases the duration of this search is the fact that it would search in underlying dependencies as well ( jars and wars ).
What you can do to restrict the searches to loaded projects and not to underlying jar and wars ?

You can use the famous not operator ( ! ) in search box of RAD or eclipse. For example if you want search not to include underlying jars and wars enter this in File name patterns box of search dialog
!*.jar, !*.war

IBM Connections/ Social Cloud Mobile App

IBM just announced that latest update to the IBM Connections Mobile is now available in the app stores.

The app provides a native set of collaboration capabilities so you can work seamlessly with your team, anytime, anywhere.  In this update you will find that you have a new hidden navigation which provides for more on screen real estate.  The new navigation also can be personalized based on the individuals needs and preferences,  so that you can organize the navigation based on what is most important to you. Apart from overhaul of UI, new views include History, Blogboard, Favorites etc.

Android ( Google Play )
IPhone ( Apple Store )

New features of IBM Connections 5 release

IBM announced the new release of IBM Connections 5 for June 2014 including some new features like:

External Collaboration 

External users will only see content shared with them and only the people associated with that content. Administrators can see who is external and manage or invite them. External communities are explicitly flagged.  External members cannot be a community owner.  External users can see business cards but not profiles. External users can search but will not see public data returned nor can they see the company directory. External users are always flagged somehow in the view (name or icon). External files are also flagged in the community. 

Deployment: You edit LotusConnections-config.xml to enable “visitorModelEnabled” to True. You then restart the server.  Enable Waltz Profiles Integration (WPI) to make sure profiles_directory_service_extension_enabled is enabled in LotusConnections-config.xml 

Disable Anonymous Access for the Connections Instance 
Register external users into the Profiles DB 
Set employee.extended role 

Licensing: CCM not supported with External Collaboration. Only authorized users may provide External Users access to IBM Connections. 


Files 
Files gallery and preview : grid view of thumbnails. More information when hovering over the thumbnail. Information like Externally shared, public, private and more via thumbnail. Plus a quick access download link.  Files Gallery can be added to the community to showcase files.  IBM File Viewer is used to generate thumbnails (free download of 1.0.6). All the files will need to be converted. You can run wasadmin for existing content.  The Media Gallery can be migratred with a few steps. The Media Gallery Feature will no longer be able to be added to a community and replaced with the Gallery App. Existing Media Galleries will keep working. 

File sync: Sync to a native mobile app or desktop. Bandwidth can be taperd to Wifi only.  Desktop File sync can save directly to Connections from any desktop app. Round rip editing.  Using the web UI you can mark files to be available offline. File Sync requires Windows 7 or 8. Also available on iOS and Android since IBM Connections 4.5 CR4. Works for personal files. 



Some of the new additional features coming in C5:

• New Activity Stream algorithm to show relevant information
• View all notifications in one area
• Link Previews to summarize content
• See recent Collaboration Spaces you have accessed
• Users can now reorder the navigation how they want
• Mark content as important using a Star like Google Mail
• People Typeahead from the search bar using name
• Activity Stream Search to look for any content like hashtag and content
• Custom landing pages in communties
• Rich text editor with Ephox EditLive!
• Expanded @ mentions across blog comments, Ideation Blogs
• Activity stream updates include conversation updates/responses inline
• Use of hashtags in status update comments
• See threaded comments from the Forum Embedded Experience.
• Some Community updates including multiple ideation blogs and recovering deleted communities
• Threaded comments in blogs (finally) and the ability to edit blog comments

Furthermore a new release for IBM Docs ( 1.0.6 ) will also be released.

Cloud, Mobile And IBM

Marketing teams across world and domains like to sum up features of products by one word, Cloud. Ironically industry still has not been able to agree on a standard definition of what a Cloud based Software is, going by the current frenzy it would be appropriate to define Cloud as a mechanism to boost sales, “Whatever sells is cloud and only Cloud is what sells“.

 What has led to this : A slow recovering US economy and a troublesome financial forecast of Europe, Software companies are aggressively marketing their products in developing economies. Industries ( even Government establishments ) do not posses the kind of money power which US or Europe companies have, so how do you sell your services to them while retaining healthy profits margins ? Answer is Cloud. SAAS model of Cloud works well for selling Software companies and for buyers. Suddenly buyers are using software’s which otherwise would have costed them a substantial portion of their budgets.
Impeding Factors : All Cloud software have one common infrastructural requirement, Excellent Broadband. Unfortunately this part of infrastructure has been largely ignored in developing countries. Neither Broadband Accessibility nor Affordability have really hurt software companies who had hoped for explosive growth in this sector. It would take years if not decades before broadband infrastructure in these economies matches upto the standards set by developed nations.

Future Hope ( Which is why big dollars keep getting invested in this domain ) :Telecom sector has booming across the world. More and more companies are now targeting mobile platforms. Which is not only important for developing economies only, it is extremely critical for western economies as well where Mobility is becoming a necessity. For software vendors like IBM, this a key area to server its customers. Take for instance the cloud offering by IBM named SmartCloud. It has lots of free mobile applications for all the major platforms (IPhone, Adroid, Symbian, BlackBerry etc. ).

Another change has come because of hand burning by big vendors ( another reason to always go with an established brand like IBM ). They are now more aware of the network scarcity in developing nations. A drastic change has been made through out project cycles, lot of time goes in developing the optimized cloud infrastructure, designing the API’s, writing the service layer of client applications and a lot more focus goes in improving the performance. Extremely strict guidelines have been laid out in testing with performance at times even guiding which features make more sense then others. Any feature which looks extremely useful but needs a lot of api requests for completion is rejected. So next time you use your shiny smartphone to leverage Cloud services from Lotuslive, its the technology by IBM which really shines.