Being able to quickly find the right people within an organization who can provide the information and expertise needed to address business challenges can give a company a significant competitive edge. With the help of social software and social networking analysis technology, individuals now have the tools to more quickly provide and find information as well as build and leverage important social networks across an organization.

In this podcast, Bill Kilduff, Chris Desforges, and Scot Bentley from IBM Software Services for Lotus discuss the latest trends in social software and uses for social networking analysis technology. They also provide an overview of Atlas for Lotus Connections, an IBM solution that helps users analyze their social networks, identify experts, and better leverage their relationships to those experts.

This article explains how to configure single sign-on (SSO) with Lightweight Third-Party Authentication (LTPA) for IBM Lotus Connections 2.0. Learn the basics of SSO and LTPA and the detailed steps for configuring SSO in a stand-alone environment.

Single sign-on (SSO) can be complex to configure, but it is beneficial to users who otherwise become annoyed when repeatedly queried for login information. Using the new home page feature in Lotus Connections 2.0, you can easily switch between different features, but you must enable SSO to connect to them seamlessly.

One question that I'm continuously asked is: "what's new in Lotus Connections v2.0.1?". Well, here's a list of what I've gathered:

   * Quickr integration with Activities - Push-button publication from an Activity into one of your Quickr Places for permanent document storage
   * Quickr integration with Communities - Allows communities to use Quickr as their content repository and document collaboration platform.
   * Enhanced person card
   * E-mail is no longer a required attribute (great for external implementations)
   * New feeds inside of Communities
   * New feeds for forums
   * New APIs for Activities, Blogs, Communities, Homepage (federated search), Profiles
   * Hidden support for STLinks (more about this tomorrow)
   * User Interface and Usability enhancements, for example:
         o Can now save members as part of an activity template
         o Drag-n-drop activities entries
         o Uploading images to a blog is now easier
         o Improvements in the Activities widget
         o Easier way to work with multiple bookmarks
   * A couple of bug fixes

What's new in administering?
Lotus Connections:

   * Preventing e-mail addresses from being displayed
   * Removing the data associated with a person or group
   * Changing the language used for notifications

Activities feature:

   * Integrating Activities with IBM Lotus Quickr

Blogs feature:

   * Synchronizing user data

Communities feature:

   * Changing Communities configuration settings
   * Removing unwanted or inappropriate content
   * Filtering active content
   * Configuring the size of the community description
   * Configuring display settings
   * Managing members and member IDs
   * Administering managed applications
   * Changing configuration settings for managed applications
   * Using the Lotus Quickr Delayed Synchronizer
   * Viewing and collecting Communities metrics
   * Retrieving and listing community data
   * Filtering community lists
   * Managing the forum scheduler

Dogear feature:

   * Synchronizing user data for Dogear

Home page feature:

   * Synchronizing member IDs between the Home page and LDAP databases

Profiles feature:

   * Updating the LDAP
   * Synchronizing LDAP changes with Profiles
   * Synchronizing the Profiles database with LDAP
   * Updating Profiles when changing LDAP directory
   * Determining the notification language for Profiles
   * Populating Profiles with photos
   * Uploading pronunciation files
   * Profiles attributes
   * Enabling custom extension attributes
   * Specifying a custom extension attribute label
   * Adding third-party links via the XML configuration file
   * Adding third-party links using JavaScript

What's new in extending?

   * Lotus Connections Connector for Lotus Quickr

LO34631: BLOGS: MANDATORY IFIX FOR BLOGS (LOTUS CONNECTIONS V2.0.1)

APAR status
OPEN

Error description

Mandatory iFix for Blogs. Globalization fixes are also part of
this iFix.

Local fix

Problem summary

Problem conclusion

Temporary fix

Comments

APAR information
APAR number        LO34631
Reported component name        CONNECTIONS BLO
Reported component ID        5724S6801
Reported release        201
Status        OPEN
PE        NoPE
HIPER        NoHIPER
Special Attention        NoSpecatt
Submitted date        2008-10-27
Closed date        
Last modified date        2008-10-27

Almost three years into my career at IBM, I find myself moving onto my third job for Big Blue. I joined IBM Software Service for Lotus, in January of 2006 after having worked as an independent Business Partner focused on Lotus Domino Web application development. As a Senior IT Specialist with ISSL, I designed and developed Domino, Forms, Sametime and Quickr solutions for customers worldwide. As Lotus Connections emerged in the field, I worked on many of the key projects for ISSL, providing architecture and implementation guidance to customers, business partners and colleagues. Last year, I transitioned to the Lotus Greenhouse team as their Technical Team Lead and helped bring in many of the Lotus technologies that are hosted there today. This week, I am excited to get started with the Lotus Connections product team and will be joining Suzanne and Baan as a Product Manager.

Lotus Connections, has taken off in the Enterprise 2.0 space and I am sure it will only continue to rise. I'm very much looking forward to bringing my background and experiences to this social software offering and can't wait to see what comes of this new job.

Collecting data: Lotus Connections applications MustGather - Read me first
 
Problem
Collecting data (MustGather document) for problems with IBM Lotus Connections. Collecting this information before calling IBM support will help you understand the problem and save time analyzing the data.
 
Symptom
Collecting this data early in the troubleshooting process--even before opening the PMR--helps IBM Support quickly determine the following:

   1. If symptoms match known problems (rediscovery).
   2. If the issue is a non-defect problem that can be identified and resolved.
   3. If there is a defect that identifies a workaround to reduce severity.
   4. The nature of the root cause, thus speeding development of a code fix.

The landing page of Lotus Connections can be easily extended by IT. An administrator has total control of which widgets can be deployed to the page. An end-user has total control of which widgets they want to see and the layout of these widgets.

In the meantime, you should know that one of the easiest ways to get started with widgets, is by using existing ones. I recently worked with a customer where we added Google Gadgets to the Lotus Connections Home Page. And we did this in a matter of minutes!!! Thinks about this for a second... and envision the vast variety of Google Gadgets out there. How cool is it that you can get one of these loaded into Lotus Connections in a matter of minutes??? Awesome, huh??!!

Adding Google Gadgets to the Lotus Connections Home page

Today, we finally have the step-by-step procedure on how to do this! The article also explains, at a high-level, how to create your own iWidget (if you weren't using the Lotus Widget Factory). Here's a sample of how the Google Date and Time Gadget looks, as a widget, in the Lotus Connections Home page:



What does this mean? You now have free out-of-the box integration with:

   * Facebook (for those of you who weren't too happy with my first approach)
   * RSS readers
   * MySpace
   * LinkedIn
   * Skype
   * Google Docs
   * or with whatever any of the 45,000+ Google Gadgets provide!

Additionally, remember that the Profiles page is also made up of widgets. Therefore, you could also deploy the Google Gadgets to the Profiles page. Neat, eh? Ready to get started? You'll find the article and the sample widget here. Enjoy!