The Connections Blog

One of the real positives of IBM's move to use the Eclipse framework as the underlying technology on which to code the Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime Connect clients is the ability to product cross-platform plug-ins that can link the many Lotus products together into an adaptable and flexible collaboration interface.  The Connections Activities plug-in has been available for a while now in Sametime (and Notes), and is very powerful as a means quickly provide drag-and-drop access to resources stored in Activities. However, many folks have been crying out for a similar means to access Profiles data or to link Connections communities with related groups within Sametime Advanced.  I'm pleased to see that IBM has now released this functionality:

Use the Lotus Connections plug-in to bring powerful capabilities of the Activities, Profiles and Communities to the Lotus Sametime client.

When you install the Lotus Connection plug-in, you can enable some or all of the following features:

Activities Sametime Feature 2.0: Use this feature to save chats to activities, open activities from your Sametime window, or find activities that you share with a contact. This feature provides a bridge between the real-time communication of Sametime and the work coordination power of Activities, a service of Lotus Connections.

Profiles Business Card Sametime Feature 2.0: Use this feature to find out more about the people in your Sametime Contact list. When you hover over a name in the contact list, the Profiles business card associated with that person is displayed. The Profiles business card provides the person's job title, location, and telephone number. It also provides links to other Lotus Connections features.

Communities Sametime Feature 2.0:  Use this feature to save individual or group chats into Discussion forums.  With Sametime Advanced add Lotus Connections Communities to your Sametime broadcast Communities.  Save Broadcast chats back into the corresponding Community.

Note: Your Lotus Connections Community Server administrator needs to install ifix LO31863 on your Communities server to use this feature.

Head over to the Lotus Solutions Catalog to download the plug-in.

One small but significant omission though - this plug-in is only supported on Windows XP/Vista and SUSE.  No Mac support yet which is a great shame.