See ya next year!

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Today is my last day of work for the year!! YIPEE!  To celebrate I've decided to wear jeans to work today (something I seldom do only on Fridays).  I'm also wearing sneakers!!  True, I'm not going to see a customer today and all I have are IBM internal meetings, but still, I feel like I'm celebrating.

2007 was an interesting year.  I started the year working my way up the Lotus Expeditor SME chain.  I spent about 5 months creating Expeditor POCs for a very large customer in the financial industry.

Next, I picked up Lotus Connections, which was not too hard given my eLearning/Lotus Workplace background.  Anyone who has played with those two products will be able to pick up Lotus Connections rather easily.  It also helps that the Lotus eLearning product has been shipping with TDI for about 3-4 years.

The Red Sox won the World Series again.  I'm a little bit offended that they decided to start winning World Series the year I moved away from Boston.  And to make things worse, the Celtics and the Patriots are ruling the world this season!!!  Maybe it's time to move back to cold Boston from sunny PR ? Hmm...

I got a chance to publish two articles on developerWorks and an asset that I created for ISSL finally shipped as part of a product.

Something that I miss as the year ends is not being able to have an office party with all my co-workers like my wife does with her co-workers. 

Looking forward to 2008, I'm starting a new job and I get to go to LotusSphere for the first time!!!  Happy holidays and have a safe, enjoyable Happy New Year...

Integrating Lotus Connections with Microsoft technologies

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Fresh off the press!  developerWorks has just published an article that I wrote.  The article summarizes the work that I did at a  very large automative-industry customer in Detroit ( ).  You can find the article here.

The article it describes two main things:

• How to add the profiles Person tag to other web applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint
• How to add presence awareness to Lotus Connections Profiles using Microsoft Live Communication Server instead of IBM Lotus Sametime

Enjoy!!  Share this with your customers and show them the integration capabilities of Lotus Connections!.. and how easy it is!

Why I love Dogear...

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Remember my story a couple of weeks ago on setting up my iMac to connect to the IBM network ? Sacha Chua turned that blog posting into a PowerPoint presentation. I guess that's another selling point for Lotus Connections and Blogs: there are people who don't have the bandwidth to create a nice/fancy presentation of their stories... but they can blog about their experiences and others can take those and create customer deliverables out of it!!



Very cool!! Oh, and Sacha, nice to meet you. I don't think we'd met before...

Customizing the Profiles Person Card Part II

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I forgot to post the before and after on Wednesday's post.  Here's how the person card looks before the modifications:



And here's how it looks after (notice that the email and phone number changed)



If you would like to see other examples of what can be changed on the Person tag, let me know!

Customizing the Profiles Person Card Part I

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As promised!  I've created instructions on how to change the Profiles person card.  You all know how the out-of-the-box Profiles person card looks:



The instructions show you how to do two things:

• Add the user's cell phone number
• Change email address from internet address to Notes address

There are three basic steps that you need to do:

1. Ensure/Configure Profiles retrieves the attribute you want to display from the database
2. Prepare the client side object that JavaScript will use to hold profile values
3. Use JavaScript to dynamically render the person card
   

Sounds complicated?  It's really not that bad.  At most, you'll need to change 3 files. 

Let me know if you have any questions!

NOTE:  The document is very technical.  It'll most likely only be understood by those of you with experience in HTML / JSP and SQL development.

Out-of-the-box attributes for Profiles

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I often get the question from customer's as to what attributes Lotus Connections Profiles supports out of the box.  I usually just mention a couple based on what I remember from my profile page.  However, I always wished I had an easy list of what's available out-of-the-box.  Today, a customer asked me to send them the entire list by email, so I had no choice but to sit down and do it.  I'm sharing it here for all to enjoy!

Note:   The following is for 1.0.2

Attributes that are currently displayed (from the top of the page to bottom):

• Organization 
• Employee Type
• Job Responsibilities
• Secretary
• Work Location (only City and State)
• Country 
• Display Name
• Building ID
• Floor
• Office Name
• Telephone Number
• Property1 (the first of the 3 custom attributes you can add to Profiles)
• VoIP telephone number 
• Pager Number            
• Fax Number
• Notes email
• Internet email
• About Me
• Background
  

Additional attributes that could be displayed:

• Is Manager ? (Y or N)
• Employee Number
• Department Number
• Work Location address1,address2,postalCode
• Preferred First/Last Name
• Alternate Last Name
• Native First/Last Name
• Pager Type
• Pager ID
• Pager Service Provider
• Calendar URL
• Free/Busy URL

Attributes that are editable:

• Job Responsibilities
• Secretary
• Display Name
• Building ID
• Floor
• Office Name
• Telephone Number
• Property1
• VoIP telephone number
• Cell phone number
• Pager number
• Fax Number
• Notes email
• Blog URL
• About Me
• Background

I also felt very productive today as I was also able to customize the pop-up person card for Lotus Connections.  Stay tuned for instructions in tomorrow's Blog posting!