Goodbye 2008

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And with this, I'll close this blog for 2008. I'll be back at work on January 2nd, 2009! At that time, I'll first go through my feed reader to see what has happened while I was away, and then I will go through my email to tackle the new year!

As I say my good bye to 2008, I wanted to recap my accomplishments. This will also help me summarize what I've done when I have my one-on-one with my manager later on to discuss my contributions to IBM.

• Moved from Social Software Services (consulting) to a new job as Social Software Technical Evangelist for IBM
• Attended Lotusphere for the first time ever!
• Got Certified as an I/T Specialist by the IBM Certification Board
• Switched to RedHat Linux from Windows XP for a couple of months as my primary workstation
• Switched to Mac from Linux in April as my primary workstation
• My wife had our first baby
• I got promoted
  
• I was (one of?) the first blogger to report on IBM's victory over Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference face-off
• Published an article in developerWorks
• Started my first BizTech project about a social software project
• Hacked Notes v8.5 for the Mac to add the Lotus Connections Activities sidebar
• Served as stakeholder for the Lotus Connections RedWiki
• Mentored 3 IBMers and helped them get published in developerWorks
• Submitted my first HackDay entry and won 1st place in the Connections category!
• Learned Dojo
• Contibuted to a social software book via a Wiki
• Was interviewed twice for a social software book
• Met with over 70 customers to talk about the business value of social software
• Served as a reviewer for two different books
• Travelled to some cities for the first time: Seattle, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo
• Created various TDI videos that were also published in tdi-users.org
• Got featured in IBM's home page (w3) twice this year!
• Continued leading the WW Lotus Social Software Community

I hope you have a very merry holiday season and a Happy New Year! Stay safe!

Register for Lotusphere Opening General Session Live Blog

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We are about 24 days away for Lotusphere 2009. At Lotusphere 2008 I live blogged the Lotusphere Opening General Session. I got some great feedback from people that were not attending that it was valuable for them to stay informed as to what was going on and what was being announced. At Lotusphere 2009, I plan to do the same thing.

This time, however, I'm going to use CoverItLive, a live blogging platform. What does this mean to you? Well, once you get to my blog, you won't have to refresh your screen every couple of minutes. It will just automatically refresh.

Interested? Well, enter your email address below, and a reminder will be sent to come back to this blog when the Opening General Sessions is about to start.

If you'll be live Tweeting, post a comment and let me know. I'll include your tweets as part of the live blog.

Alternatively, if you want to see what other people are saying, you can also use Twitter's search mechanism to view a feed of comments from the Lotusphere Opening General Session. If you want to use Twitter (It's free and you don't have to register), use these URLs:

• Web Browser: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23LS09 (you may have to refresh your screen every couple of minutes)
• Feed Reader: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23LS09

IdeaJam iWidget for Lotus Connections

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Last night Bruce Elgort, from our friends over at Elguji, used Twitter to see if anyone could answer some questions he had about Lotus Connections and iWidgets. A couple of minutes later, I responded to Bruce offering my assistance. We used Twitter to coordinate whether we could speak over the phone (a.k.a Skype) and minutes later we were Skyping away! (Is "Skyping" that the right word?? I'm still new to Skype...)

Anyway, he wanted to know what the effort would be to create an IdeaJam iWidget for the Lotus Connections Homepage and what would be the easiest approach. I told him that if he could get me a very simple HTML page, I could do an iWidget that would call that HTML page via an IFRAME. We agreed that we would follow up today in the morning to see how much progress he'd made.

Turns out that about 1/2 hour later, he lets me know that his side is done. To say the least, I was very impressed! You see, IdeaJam is a Notes/Domino application. Therefore, all he had to do was create a new 'View' that provided just the data that he wanted and rendered that as HTML. (Don't ask me what a View is.. I know very little about Notes/Domino applications, but I'm sure Bruce will discuss more at his blog later today).

Now that he had his View rendering the data, I had to create the actual iWidget to be deployed onto Lotus Connections. This process took about 2-3 minutes! The iWidget is very simple and only has about 4 lines of XML in it. If you want to take a look at the iWidget XML, click here. I then went into the Lotus Connections Administration interface, added the iWidget to the Homepage (which I have already proven that it takes less than 30 seconds) and voilá!

We then spent some time playing with the CSS to get the look-n-feel right and produced this:

The iWidget displays the 5 most recent ideas and the IdeaSpace they belong to. If you want to use this iWidget on your own Lotus Connections deployment, simply point to this URL: http://blog.lbenitez.com/widgets/IdeaJamWidget.xml

I think that what's also impressive about this story is that Twitter enabled this collaboration. I've only met Bruce (recently) via Twitter and had never collaborated with him before! Yet, we were able to get together and quickly create this nice piece of integration!

Very cool, right? What do you think ?

Lotus Connections Mobility Video

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I was recently directed to this video which talks about the Lotus Strategy and its mobility capabilities. Mobile access to your applications is key, especially for social software. I, for one, use Twitter, Facebook, and Lotus Connections Dogear because I have free native applications that run on my BlackBerry. When I'm at a customer site and I'm stumped with a question, I turn to my trusty Dogear to find the answer. When I'm travelling to/from said customer, I like to see what's going on in my personal social network by turning to Facebook. Then, I like to see what's going on in my semi-personal/semi-professional network at Twitter.

By the way, my constant access to Twitter means I can be more responsive to my customers and business partners. And recently a light bulb went off in my head: IBM gets more value from me using Twitter, than I personally do. I think I need to expand on that in a future blog post.

Anyway, here's a quick video showing the different Lotus products in a mobile world. I like Kristen:

Feel free to share it!

How To Allow Anonymous Comments in Lotus Connections Blogs

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Well, sort of. A customer this week asked me how to modify the blog template so that anonymous users could click on the 'Add a Link' comment. By default, the link is completely disabled until the user clicks on 'Log In', authenticates, and returns back to the blog entry.

I took it upon myself to look at the blog theme and figure out how to make this change. Since the themes for blogs are created using Velocity (an open source template engine), I took a quick peek of the Apache site to learn some things about how Velocity works.

Below are the steps I followed to get this working:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/installedApps/<cell_name>/Blogs.ear/blogs.war/themes/<theme name>
2. Save a backup of _header.vm and Weblog.vm
3. Open _header.vm with your favorite text editor
4. Find the following line
   
   

   #if($utils.isJapanese()) <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- { var func = window.onload; window.onload = function() { if(func) { func(); } document.body.className = document.body.className + " lotusJapanese"; } } //--> </script> #end

   
   
   and replace it with:
   
   

   #if($utils.isJapanese()) <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- { var func = window.onload; window.onload = function() { if(func) { func(); } document.body.className = document.body.className + " lotusJapanese"; } } //--> </script> #else <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- { var func = window.onload; window.onload = function() { if(func) { func(); } var luisBlogsUser = getCookie("blogsUser"); if (null != luisBlogsUser && luisBlogsUser != '') { hideAllActionForms(); AddWeblogEntryCommentForm.toggle('show'); Field.focus('commentContent'); } } } //--> </script> #end

   
   
   
5. Save _header.vm
6. Open Weblog.vm with your favorite text editor
7. Find the following line
   
   
   

   <a class="disabledLink" id="AddWeblogEntryCommentLink" title="$text.get('entryview.actionmenu.loginHint')">$text.get("entryview.actionmenu.add_a_comment")</a>

   
   
   and replace it with:
   
   
   

   <a class="lotusAction" id="AddWeblogEntryCommentLink" title="$text.get('entryview.actionmenu.loginHint')" href="$url.site/roller-ui/login-redirect.jsp?redirect=$entry.permalink">$text.get("entryview.actionmenu.add_a_comment")</a>

   
   
   
8. Save Weblog.vm
9. Restart the Blogs server and voilá

And here's how it looks.

When you do this change, the 'Add a Comment' link appears for anonymous users. When they click the link, they will be sent to the login page. After successfully authenticating, they are re-directed back to the blog entry with the comment form automatically expanded.

Enjoy!

Google OneBox: Integrate Lotus Connections with Google Search Appliance

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Lately, there's been a lot of buzz around Lotus Connections and Google integration. More specifically, around Dogear and Google and the integration that I did a while ago. Earlier this week, I announced that this integration won 2nd place in the Lotus HackDay contest under the 'Web Applications' category. Yesterday, it was announced that this integration won 1st place in the HackDay Global Connections category! If you want to see what all the hype is about and start using this integration, follow these instructions.

Now, stuff just keeps getting better. With great timing, a business partner, Persistent Systems, has just released Google OneBox, a connector that can be deployed to your Google Search Appliance to automatically index Lotus Connections data and show it embedded in the Google search results. No browser plug-in required!

These slides explain a bit more about the solution:

Lotus Connections One Box

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: lotus connections)

I believe integration with enterprise search is extremely important for successful social software adoption. At IBM, we have driven adoption of social software partly by integrating enterprise search results with Lotus Connections search results. In fact, there's a trend now were most IBMers end up clicking on the Lotus Connections search results that are embedded and shown side-by-side the enterprise search results. In fact, IBM did a case study and was able to calculate a yearly multi-million dollar savings thanks to social bookmarking and enterprise search integration.

If you want to learn more about this solution, see the Google OneBox for Lotus Connections page. (it's not yet part of the Lotus Connections Solutions Catalog, but it will be soon).

Lotus Quickr and Connections Connector Is Now Available

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Last month I discussed some of the new features in Lotus Connections v2.0.1. More specifically, you now have the following capabilities:

The IBM® Lotus® Connections Connector for Lotus® Quickr™ allows users to create associated Lotus Quickr team places for their Lotus Connections Communities. In Lotus Quickr, they can organize, share files, and collaborate on documents from a central location. When a new Connections Community is created, the associated Quickr team place is also created and the access control and membership of the Quickr place will be determined by the often fluctuating Connections Community membership. Communities associated with a team place in Lotus Quickr can aggregate updates in the community overview page, making it easier to stay current with projects and work collaboratively.

Here's a couple of screenshots of how that looks like:

You can download this new connector from here. This connector works with Lotus Connections v2.0.1 and Quickr J2EE (a.k.a. Quickr Portal) v8.1.1 which I understand is already available for download.

How to Allow Lotus Connections Profiles to Accept PNG Images

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A customer recently reached out and told me that Lotus Connections Profiles was only accepting images (or photos) in GIF and JPEG format. He had a need, however, to allow end users to upload their photos in PNG format.

You may be thinking that in order to allow this, I had to hack away the code, change some JSPs files, add a lot of Java code, and the such. Au contraire, my friend! Here's what I had to do to enable PNG photo uploads in Profiles:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/installedApps/<CELL_NAME>/Profiles.ear/peoplepages.war/WEB-INF
2. Save a backup of validation.xml
3. Open validation.xml with your favorite text editor
4. Find this line (it's there twice):
   
   

   <var-value>image/jpeg,image/pjpeg,image/gif</var-value>

   
   
   and add the following lines after it:
   
   

   <var-value>image/jpeg,image/pjpeg,image/gif,image/png,image/x-png</var-value>

   
   
   
5. Remember, this line appears in two places so make sure you edit both lines
6. Save the file
7. Restart the system

Don't you love it when the architecture for a product allows you to do easy things like this ? I do..

P.S. In case you are wondering about the two MIME types.. Firefox uses image/png and IE uses image/x-png. Go figure ...

Dogear and Google Integration Gets 2nd Prize in Lotus HackDay

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Woo Hoo!!!!. That's right, late last week I got an email from Bob Picciano, Lotus' General Manager. In it, I was informed that Dogle (a.k.a. Google Dogeared) has won 2nd place in the Web Applications category of the Lotus HackDay contest. The price? Some cash which is very timely given the holiday season that's quickly approaching!

Dogle is a hack I did in which Google and Dogear results are shown side-by-side. It's a hack that I coded in a couple of hours. If you want to install it and give it a try, you can follow the instructions here.

For those of you, non-IBMers, HackDay is a one-day competition challenging IBMers to come up with the most interesting "Hack". "Hack", in this case refers to ability to come up with a solution to a problem or an interesting idea you've been thinking about.

Thanks to all who took the time to vote for my hack and participate in this process.

Sametime Unyte Has Been Upgraded

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Over this past weekend, Lotus Sametime Unyte has been upgraded to version 8.2b.

The enhancements that have been added are very timely. I was just going to post a blog entry on my "Sametime Unyte Wish List For The Holidays", but everything that I was going to ask for has already been added. Take a peek at some of the new features that have been added to Sametime Unyte:

• Support of PDF & ODF (OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony) document formats in addition to Microsoft formats
• Firefox 3.0 support
  
• A waiting room for attendees who join a conference prior to the host
• Performance acceleration for international customers so all attendees, regardless of location can count on consistent, fast response rates
• Multi-language support so individuals can host and join conferences in their preferred G1 language.
• One-click start of a Web conference from Lotus Sametime messaging service via a shelf

Are you ready to start hosting a meeting? It's easy, just head out to http://www.sametimeunyte.com and off you go!

Quick Tip: Want to send out an invite with a one-click meeting URL? Use this format: http://www.sametimeunyte.com/join/?schedid=xxxxxxx (and replace xxxxxx with your meeting's passcode).

Lotus Connections goes 3D !

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While I'm supposed to be officially on vacation today, these news couldn't wait until Monday to be published. I recently ran into a press release detailing how Lotus Connections now works in a 3D virtual environment. Cool, huh? So what's the deal? Well, Forterra has just released OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) v2.2 and with it come new collaboration features and integration with Lotus Connections and Lotus Sametime. Lotus Connections can serve the user's profile and avatar information to OLIVE. Here's a preview of some of the new features: The key OLIVE capabilities being released this month include:

• A Virtual Meeting Reservation System that allows a meeting organizer to reserve a 3D room type (ex, auditorium, board room, classroom), room equipment (ex, projector screen size, chairs, and podiums), and to invite mandatory and optional attendees.
• Invitations are sent out through the user's native email system (e.g. Lotus Notes), and if accepted display in their native calendaring system.
• Presenting on 3D screens and viewing by all participants a spectrum of media including MS Powerpoint files, streaming videos (Windows Media Player® based), any software application running on a Windows desktop, and collaborative whiteboards.
• A Lotus Sametime plug-in so users can achieve single sign-on to OLIVE from Lotus Sametime, instantly invite colleagues to join a 3D meeting directly from their Lotus Sametime client, or schedule a future meeting through the Virtual Meeting Reservation System.
• Presence awareness of other OLIVE or Sametime users logged in. Users can quickly join a colleague in a virtual environment by teleporting to their location.
• Avatar profiles through integration with any social networking system like LinkedIn, Facebook, Lotus Connections, a Learning Management System or enterprise HR system so users can view the profile of another meeting attendee by right clicking on their avatar.
• Simplified firewall port configuration and compatibility so IT departments can set the communications for OLIVE to work through two firewall ports. OLIVE has always supported being able to deploy entirely behind a firewall.
• Support for 3D model import into OLIVE for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, Google Sketchup, Blender, Poser Pro, FaceGen, and Softimage, and other content authoring tools which provide COLLADA file export options.

Here's a demo of the Lotus Sametime and OLIVE integration:

For more information, check out the entire press release here.

One-Way Adaptability is Key in Social Software

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I forget now how I got this link, but I was recently notified of a report published by Accenture. The report, "New-Generation Workers" Want Technology Their Way, was published last month. The report has already been reviewed widely in the blogsphere, for example, here. I, however, wanted to add my two cents because I think it summarizes and emphasizes what I evangelize the most: social software should adapt to your needs, and not the other way around!

Now, Accenture's survey wasn't social software specific. It was about technology in general. However, I would like to point out the needs of this new workforce. And attracting this new workforce is often one of the business needs I hear from my customers. And that's one of the business needs that drive them to look at social software.

The needs of the new workforce:

• Millennials want to choose their technology
• Younger employees insist on state-of-the-art technology
• Organizations will need to provide new communication and collaboration channels. Millenials expect employers to provide communication channels such as online chat, instant messaging, mobile text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their customers and clients.
• Coming to the end of e-mail as we know it. [...] High school and young college students spend less than two hours a week e-mailing, instead preferring text, instant messaging, and communicating on social networking sites.

In my opinion, this new workforce has figured out ways to be productive. They have a system. They know how to collaborate. And, they expect their employers to provide these same collaboration tools. I guess it's like taking away email for those of you addicted to email. How will you ever collaborate ?

Here are the preferred communication methods of these Millenials (graphic from Social Computing Magazine):

I'm actually surprised that they prefer mobile text messages over RSS feeds. But that's why it's important that when you are reviewing and selecting social software, you choose a platform that adapts to a user's needs. That way, the end user decides how to use the software, how to better take advantage of it, how to make the best of it.

Adaptability is also the sum of Principle 5 and Principle 8 of the Principles of Social Software.

According to the News: Social Software Increases Productivity

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I've been quiet. I know. There are several reasons for that:

• I'm working on a BizTech project and I can't say much more than that. For now, just know that I'm coding something that will soon be offered by IBM as part of our social software offerings! Oh and if you are following my Tweets, then you know that I'm using Dojo for that
• Lotusphere is around the corner (46 days) and can't spill the beans on the surprises to come (yet)
• Working on several opportunities that we are trying to close (including several million users!!! wow!!)
• Running the World Wide Social Software Community. As the leader for the IBM Social Software Community (1000+ members) I've been busy lately planning out the schedules for our upcoming speakers, putting together the newsletters, and planning the events for Lotusphere. Running a community is a lot of work! I may have to blog more about this later...
• Learning a bit about .NET development for a project I have in Toronto next week

But trust me. I've not forgotten about you! I still have a couple of blog posts queued up that I have to review and post. In the meantime, I wanted to share the following piece of GREAT news (pun intended). My good buddy, Adrian Spender just blogged about this. RTE News, based out of Dublin, yesterday visited the IBM Dublin office where about 50% of IBM's social software development team is located.

After interviewing several IBMers, including my good old friend Mike Roche, RTE News put together the following news clip on yesterday's nightly news. Here you will learn a little bit more about IBM's Beehive, a proving grounds for social software where the most interesting and useful features would then make it into Lotus Connections.

In the video, the reporter emphasizes how IBM is using social software to make their employees more productive. This is great timing, given IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano's recent comments that:

IBMers are figuring out how best to incorporate social networking into their work, at a pretty good pace. They're figuring out that collaboration isn't a productivity hit, it makes them smarter.

Enjoy!

Lotus Connections and Telephony Integration

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Recently, I was directed to this very cool demo. It shows a Telephony iWidget that was developed and deployed on the Lotus Connections Home page. This widget was recently shown at VoiceCon 2 weeks ago.

Here you will see how you search for expertise based on a keyword (or tag). Once you find that person, you can initiate a call right from the Lotus Connections user interface.

This is very exciting for the following reasons:

• More people are developing on the Lotus Connections Platform
• Shows the extensibility of the person card
• Shows the extensibility of the Home page
• Shows the extensibility and integration capabilities with UC² tools

Enjoy!

Learning Experiences: A Successful Social Software PoC

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The following is a summary of a successful social software PoC that I participated on for a customer in Texas. I'm sharing it here so that you can compare how this company did things right, as opposed to that other PoC that went downhill.

Customer Y is an account I have been working closely with around Quickr and Connections. We've successfully setup a PoC for both products - the IT Manager signed off on a formal PoC Closure to ensure that it met his criteria. Technically it is successful, but it wasn't sold in our eyes - some understood the value immediately while it didn't seem of much value to others. Connections, just like any other social software, is really a product which should have content to understand its potential and value. Think of the early days of Facebook when none of your friends were there... how useful was that?

Last Friday we held a "user-adoption" or "getting started" workshop around Connections and Quickr (promoted internally by the customer and content/material/prizes provided by IBM).

The Goal

• Pump their environment with relative and pertinent content
• Have attendees "invite colleagues", share Dogear'd bookmarks, added to a Community, Team place or Activity so even those that do not come are notified about the products
  
• Have users understand that they don't have to be content authors to benefit from the value - you can take advantage of the info in Connections to gain business value
• Walk away with a simple understanding of what it is and have them access it from their desk the next time they work.

The Challenge

• We had 1 room with 10 workstations, for 4 hours - only have web browser to interface the products (do not have the chance to expose connectors and integration capabilities).
• Users will be coming in and out at their convenience, so no formal presentation that can reach everyone at once.
  
• Expose as much of Connections and Quickr as possible in 15 minutes max.
  
• Have them use the pilot environment again from their desk after they walk away from the workshop.
  

What Did We Do To Make This A Success?

We secured funding for prizes to attract attendees. I worked with the customer's resource to create a promo flyer which he posted on their digital bulletin board and printed flyers for distribution/posting within the customer site.

Laurisa Rodriguez created content titled "Getting Started with Lotus Connections". However, it covers each service in great detail - to complete all labs it would take a user at least an hour. I revised the material to the idea of "jump start" users. I took the easiest pieces they would find immediate value for in each Lotus Connections Service, and if they really like it, they can always come back and explore further from at their own convenience. In addition, knowing that we cannot reach the masses by attendance, I geared the material so they share and connect with folks that were not present. The authentication was against their real LDAP server and both products were configured to their production SMTP servers.

Even with the material reduced in content, we faced an issue of reaching the time limit, so we improvised and made 4 labs mandatory and 2 optional - it would change for users based on a discussion of what they wanted to walk away with.


Last, knowing that anyone who walks away with a 10-15 page packet will probably place it on a shelf and never look at it again - had to come up with an idea of how they would remember this even and hopefully access it again. I took existing slideware and created double-sided postcards (4 prints per sheet on stock card that was cut afterwards); it had the key message of "what is?" with links to their internal PoC environment and the other side had details to each of the services of Connections and Quickr so they know what might fit their use case if they forget.

Lotus Connections and Quickr Postcard

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: card reference)

Results Of This Effort

We had a turn out of 66 users (after only promoting the event for 2 days) from different lines of businesses (IT [including Directors], Marketing, R&D, Service Desk, Business Analysts, Sales, Customer Operations, and a few more). Within the first 20 minutes of the start, all workstations were occupied with folks waiting in the back to participate (3 more workstations were added to handle the additional users). Each person sent an invite from Profiles to at least 5 others to be their "colleague", expanding the network to 330 users from this event! More users were exposed from the other services as well. And folks were asking to take more than one postcard to distribute and share with their peers as they think it is very powerful or very cool. The feedback was great and the product sells itself when it's exposed in the right manner.

We met with the admin Monday ~1 PM after event, and he said 2 comments that really stuck:

• "My inbox is getting full with messages of attendees sending emails to their teams saying they didn't realized this was setup with real email integration and now telling their teammate about it."
• "It's growing virally since the introduction on Friday afternoon and I think we're going to have to give the VM's more resource as it gains popularity"
• "I'm surprised how the PoC environment was stable to handle this surge of data and run smoothly"
  

The best part is so many folks were exposed to it and if it gains popularity by different lines of businesses, it makes it that much more easier for the product to stick. And even if people do not contribute content, they will consume just from the Profiles service as it was pre-populated with real data. I think it was a real success and please feel free to re-use the material to help push the value further.

Lotus Connections Sessions at Lotusphere

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So here it, the highly awaited list of Lotus Connections sessions at Lotusphere. Although, none of my sessions got accepted, I do see that some of my ideas will be presented by other people. For example, remember when I blogged about the session for "Social Software Adoption" and put the idea on IdeaJam? Well, that idea got accepted!!!! I would like to personally (through this blog) thank you all who voted for the idea. I can't wait to see you all at Lotusphere!

Without much futher a do:

Breakout Sessions:

• JMP306 - IBM Lotus Connections: Up and Running
• INV101 - From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration, Productivity, and Adoption in the Enterprise
• INV105 - Glimpsing the Future: Report from IBM Research & The Center for Social Software
• INV107 - The Future of Enterprise Collaboration
• AD401 - Lotus Connections Customizations
• AD402 - IBM Lotus Connections Atom API Deep Dive
• AD405 - Are you REALLY Taking Advantage of an Integrated Collaboration Experience?
• AD409 - Build for Success: Getting the most out of Lotus Collaboration and Social Software
• ID302 - IBM Lotus Connections Deployment Architecture and Best Practices
• ID303 - Integrating IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Lotus Connections Using IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory (Question: Where have I seen this before ? )
• ID304 - What's Next with Lotus Connections
• ID305 - Taking Lotus Connections Mobile
• BP404 - Best Practices on Social Software Adoption (WOO HOO!!!)
• SHOW302 - Getting your feet wet with Lotus Connections

The Birds of a Feather sessions haven't been posted yet. I'll keep you updated when I do.

P.S. This is not Lotus Connections related, but looks cool: "Mac to the Future": Lotus Notes 8.5 and Lotus Offerings for Mac OS X

How to enable STLinks in Lotus Connections v2

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This is a question that I often get: "How do I enable STLinks in Lotus Connections v2"? In fact, it's one of the most discussed questions in the Lotus Connections Forum.

This functionaity works in v2 just like it did in v1. Therefore, to enable this in v2, it's as simple as following the instructions in the v1 InfoCenter.

I'm not sure why the instructions haven't been copied to the v2 InfoCenter, but maye they'll do it now ! In any case, I wanted to make sure that this would work on a Lotus Connection v2.0.1 environment before blogging about this. Therefore, I successfully tested the v1 instructions on my own 2.0.1 environment.

But a little background first. In my test environment, I have two servers:

1. Connections and DB2 (http://connections.demoibm.com)
2. Sametime and Domino LDAP (http://collab.demoibm.com)

So here's what I did:

1. Enabled SSO between Sametime and Connections
2. Copied the contents of c:/lotus/domino/data/domino/html/sametime/stlinks (from the Sametime server) to c:/ibm/httpserver/htdocs/en_US (in the Connections server)
3. Modified LotusConnections-config.xml to specify the STLinks URL (http://collab.demoibm.com/sametime/stlinks) as documented in the InfoCenter
4. Restarted the server
5. Voilá

After restarting the server, here's how it looks when I click on someone's name that's connected at this moment:

The beauty of this is that it does not require Notes v8.5 or Sametime Client v8.0.2 to be installed and running on someone's machine. As long as the browser supports JavaScript, it works!

Note: While this works, it is not officially supported by IBM

Enjoy!

Social Software for Higher Learning: a second look!

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You may remember that last week I blogged about how a university in Brazil is using social software to enhance both the formal and informal learning aspects of their education environment. You can go here to review that blog entry and see a video of the customer explaining why they chose Lotus Connections.

As you may have seen in my tweets, this week I was working on a local Learning 2.0 event that was hosted by Interamerican University. I was invited to speak on "Social Software for Higher Learning and Community Collaboration". Long title, huh ?

Challenges

By now, you know that when I first started at IBM, I worked as one of the developers for IBM's eLearning product. For 5 years, I concentrated on eLearning and had specific focus in the Education industry. For the past 2 years though, I've been working with social software across many industries. Therefore, I got myself up to speed with some of the references and success stories, such as the one that I blogged about last week.

But by far, the biggest challenge was getting ready to present in Spanish. While I deliver the Value of Social Software almost twice a day, it's always in English. Words such as 'leverage', 'enable', 'empower', 'key', 'deliver', 'pervasive', etc have become part of my lingo (even with my family!!), but that's because Spanglish is accepted in our household. Spanglish at an all-Spanish conference just looks unprofessional.

Luckily, my good friend and co-worker Laurisa had blogged about this same challenge internally. I referenced that blog and off I went!

Socializing and Presenting

I relied heavily on the Keynote speech at the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Tech Day when I created my presentation. My next challenge? Trying to fit a demo of all our offerings and talk about in 45 minutes!! I clearly wanted to showcase as much of our technology as possible, but at the same time give sufficient context to the CIOs, CTOs, and professors in the room.

tags: socialsoftware technology

As the attendees came in, I introduced myself and asked about their challenges and frustrations. One dean told me that his biggest frustration is that discussion in the classroom is null. He does use an online forum, and that's where all the "classroom" discussion happens. Interesting!!

Another professor shared his biggest pain: search. "Oh what I surprise I have for you..." (though Dogear doesn't translate well into Spanish).

Another dean expressed that usability was her biggest challenge. Today's students try an application once. If it doesn't work and it doesn't adapt to their needs, they won't use it again.

At first, I was planning for a 20 minute presentation and 25 minute demo. However, as I talked to the faculty in the room prior to my turn, it was clear that they understood today's students. They knew what the pains were. They knew they needed something to improve the learning experience. Therefore, I cut my presentation short to 15 minutes and spent 45 minutes demoing.

That's right, the interest was so big, that I overran my time for 15 minutes (with the permission of the audience).

Demo'ing

When demoing our social software solution, I used an integrated environment of Portal, Instant Messaging, Quickr, and Lotus Connections. I spent a considerable amount of time populating data that was specific to the audience, even using the names and pictures of the people in the audience! (I asked the registration desk to take a picture of each attendee and I loaded them up into Profiles while the other presentations were going on).

Next Steps

The event generated tons of interest and we have scheduled several follow-up meetings with deans and other faculty members. Woo Hoo!!!!

P.S. I was going to post the slides here. The presentation, however, is a new one that I created and it's mostly pictures and I didn't have time to add the speaker notes. When I get some time, do expect to see it here, though!

Nominate Lotus Connections as the best Social Networking Application

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I recently picked this up in a blog by an ex-IBMer and thought it was a fantastic idea. Therefore, I wanted to share it with you all!!!

Simply enter your email address to nominate Lotus Connections as the best Social Networking Application.

And once you do, spread the word!!!

Lotus Connections and Sametime Awareness on UID

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I know I've been a bit quiet lately. Yes, I know I haven't published anything since Friday. Here's the thing, tomorrow I'm presenting on "Social Software for Higher Learning" at a Learning 2.0 event that's happening here. CIO's and CTO's from all the different colleges and universities on the island are going to be at the event. But I'll blog more about that later.

Today, I just want to share a quick tip with you. Recently, we were working on a customer to enable Instant Messaging within Lotus Connections with Sametime. By now, you already know that the integration works seamlessly if you have Notes 8.5 or Sametime 8.0.2. You can also get it to work with Sametime v7.5+ and Notes v8+ by installing a special plugin.

By default, the awareness lookup happens via the user's email address. However, at this particular customer, Sametime was configured to only allow lookups via uid and not email. The usual solution to this is to configure Sametime to do lookups via email. This, however, was not an option for this customer.

Therefore, we had to customize Lotus Connections to do lookups via uid. With the help of super awesome Firebug, we were able to figure this out. Here are the steps we followed:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/installedApps/<cellName>/Profiles.ear/peoplepages.war/js_build/dojo
2. Save a copy of profiles.js and profiles.js.uncompress.js
3. Open profiles.js with your favorite text editor
4. Search for the following text:
   
   

   getstatus/";url+=profilesData.displayedUser.email+"?jsonp=lconn.profiles

   
   
   and replace it with this text:
   
   

   getstatus/";url+=profilesData.displayedUser.uid+"?jsonp=lconn.profiles

   
   
   
5. Save profiles.js
6. Open profiles.js.uncompress.js with your favorite text editor
7. Search for the following text:
   
   

   url += profilesData.displayedUser.email + "?jsonp=lconn.profiles.PersonTag.loadIMStatusCallBack&time=" + new Date().getTime();

   
   
   and replace it with this text:
   
   

   url += profilesData.displayedUser.uid + "?jsonp=lconn.profiles.PersonTag.loadIMStatusCallBack&time=" + new Date().getTime();

   
   
   
8. Save profiles.js.uncompress.js
9. Restart the HTTP server and the Lotus Connections server

Enjoy!

How to upgrade to Lotus Connections 2.0.1

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Well, I'm finally done. I'm sad to say that it took ~12 hours to upgrade from Lotus Connections 2.0.0.1 to 2.0.1. It seems that there are some problems with the Update Installer. Apparently, shipping a product on Halloween (like trying an underwater escape) is not a good idea. Or maybe one of our competitors hacked into our servers and broke it for us??

Anyway, here's the steps that I had to take to upgrade my Lotus Connections 2.0.0.1 server to 2.0.1:

1. Download the Lotus Connections 2.0.1 Fix Pack from Fix Central (select Lotus, Lotus Connections, 2.0.0.0, <your platform>)
2. Download the 2.0.1 Update Installer from Fix Central (select Lotus, Lotus Connections, 2.0.1.0, <your platform>)
3. Download the Lotus Connections 2.0.1 Database Wizards from Passport Advantage
4. Stop the Lotus Connections server
5. Upgrade the DB silently (you can use the wizard, but then you will have to upgrade the Blogs DB manually)
6. Upgrade the product from 2.0.0.1 to 2.0.1 silently (the wizard didn't work for me). I used the following command:
   

   updateLC.bat -installDir c:\ibm\WebSphere\LotusConnections -fixpack -install -fixpackDir c:\ibm\WebSphere\LotusConnections\update\fixpacks -fixpackID LC201_Fixpack -wasUserid lcadmin -wasPassword passw0rd

7. Perform step 10 as listed here. (It's listed as an Optional step, but it's really a Required step)
8. Start the Lotus Connections server
9. Run the following wsadmin command
   1. Start the wsadmin interface
   2. Type the following command: execfile("blogsAdmin.py")
   3. Type the following command: BlogsMigrationService.populateLoginNames()
   4. Type exit to quit the wsadmin interface
10. Stop the Lotus Connections server
11. Download the latest fixes from the page where you downloaded the 2.0.1 Fixpack (see step 1 above)
12. Install the iFixes silently. I used this command:
    

    updateLC.bat -fix -installDir "C:\ibm\websphere\lotusconnections" -fixdir "c:\ibm\websphere\lotusconnections\update\fixes" -install -fixes LO34540 LO34604 LO34631 LO34638 LO34665 LO34676 -wasUserId lcadmin -wasPassword passw0rd

13. Re-do your changes to the <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>/config/cells/<cellname>/LotusConnections-Config/*.xml files
14. Delete your Dogear index
15. Start your Lotus Connections server!

And there you have it. I'm giving this to the documentation folks so they can fix the InfoCenter.

Note: Updated on Nov 11, 2008 to fix the order of the steps.

I own the world!

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Well, a piece of it, anyway. Let me explain. Yesterday was a big day for me, in my opinion. I closed a loan to buy my first piece of the world. My first piece of "real" property.

While I already own my condo, I don't consider that to be "real" since I don't actually own the land where the condo sits. But now, finally, I own a piece of this world. This is sure the first step in my plans for global domination!

Nah, while I don't plan to rule the world, I do feel a sense of responsibility. Now that I'm expanding my family, I want to make sure that I set an example for them. I definitely want to focus on designing and building a house that's environment friendly and try to do my part so that my kids have a clean, safe world to play in.

Here's the area where I bought. You can see several lots here. In order to protect preserve keep some privacy, I won't tell you which one, or how much I paid for it .

View Larger Map

I've heard horror stories about contractors and the such. I'm sure it's going to be a fun and stressful situation. Let the adventure begin!!

Lotus Connections for Higher Learning

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Remember that story that I told you a while ago on how a university displaced their eLearning software and is now using Lotus Connections? Well, here's a video that was recently posted on YouTube and explains the rationale behind that decision and why Lotus Connections and social software fits better.

Enjoy!

Lotus Connections v2.0.1 is here!

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Each quarter, there's a new version of Lotus Connections out there. This quarter we shipped Lotus Connections 2.0.1 (on Halloween). I didn't post anything on Friday, 'cause I thought sharing some baby pictures in his costume was a tad more important. Also, the new version was very well covered by Stuart and Mitch.

If you are upgrading, you can download it from IBM's Fix Central. 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:
  • Can now save members as part of an activity template
  • Drag-n-drop activities entries
  • Uploading images to a blog is now easier
  • Improvements in the Activities widget
  • Easier way to work with multiple bookmarks
• A couple of bug fixes
  

What's Going on in My Network? A Recommendation From a Customer

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A potential customer sent me this on Friday so that I could share with the UX team. Since I know the Lotus Connections UI Designers follow this blog, I thought I would share this here instead of emailing them.

Aden Davies, who I met through Twitter and the Lotus Connections Twitter Feed, works as an "Innovation Technician at a large bank". We were talking about some of the new features in 2.0.1 and he shared his vision of a great addition to our widgets. He actually sat down and spent the time developing this mockup.

I actually liked this a lot. I even suggested something like this be added because it's very similar to the home page feed you would see in Facebook.

The idea is to provide a better feed as to what's going on around you.

I think this is also a great example of how Twitter can be used to improve collaboration with your customers and drive innovation into products faster!

Ready for our first Halloween

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That's right, today is Halloween and Alejandro is ready for his first Halloween. Now, he, of course, can't eat candy, but that doesn't mean that daddy can't be young again and go trick-or-treating. In fact, this is a great excuse, I think, to be able to eat candy and have my wife approve!

We just dressed the baby in his costume: a super mighty roaring Lion! Check out some of the pictures below.

Enjoy:

Ale enjoying his new costume

He says he wants to eat some of the candy, but doesn't have any teeth :(

Baby pondering what kind of 'trickts' to pull on those who don't give him a treat!

Baby practicing his mighty "Roooooooooarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"

Lotus Connections shortlisted for Irish Software Associaton Awards

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My feed reader has been keeping me busy lately. Yesterday, I found out that Lotus Connections has been shortlisted for the Irish Software Association Awards. To quote Mike Roche, Chief Architect for the Dublin Software Lab:

Lotus Connections 2.0 has been shortlisted for the Technical Innovation Award by the Irish Software Association. The Dublin lab has also been shortlisted for the Collaboration award for ongoing work with academic and industry partners and joint research programs across Ireland and Europe.

The other candidates for the awards are listed here. The winners will be announced next week on November 7th. Stay tuned!

Education materials for Lotus Connections

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Even though I may be starting to develop a love-hate relationship with feed readers.. I still love 'em! Case in point, yesterday I found out about some new training offerings for Lotus Connections.

Heath McCarthy casually stumbled upon these offerings and blogged about it internally. There are four courses available:

Course Type	Course Name	Audience
Instructor-Led	Implementing Lotus Connections	Domino / Connections Administrators
Instructor-Led	Social Networking with Lotus Connections Workshop	Social Network Administrators / LOB sponsors
Self-Paced (eLearning)	Using Lotus Connections	Administrators / End-Users
Self-Paced (eLearning)	Social Networking with Lotus Connections Workshop	IT Administrators / LOB sponsors

I think the third course listed above would be really useful in helping you drive adoption. It serves as great introductory material that can be hosted either in your existing LMS (Learning Management System) or in your own intranet / portal.

For more information on the educational offerings for Lotus Connections, visit this page on ibm.com.

I have a love-hate relationship with feed readers

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Feed readers are great. I've said it over and over again. But I'm beginning to develop a love-hate relationship with feed readers.

Great for mobile users

As you know by now, in this new job I get to travel to customers all over to discuss the business value of social software and best practices for social software adoption. And since I live in Puerto Rico, my flights are usually long, especially now that American Airlines has eliminated the hub in SJU.

With so much travel, what's one to do? Well, sometimes I use that time to catch up with what TiVo has recorded for me using TiVo Butler on my Mac. Often, though, I launch my feed reader and start digesting what's going on in the blogs and forums that I'm interested in or anything else that has been tagged with the topics that I'm interested in: "enterprise2.0", "web2.0", "social-computing", etc. The content that I find there ? More often than not, it's great content! Content that I want to comment on and discussions that I want to contribute back and questions that I know I can answer.

The Love turns to Love-Hate

This is where I get stuck. I would love to reply to discussion threads, blog entries and other stuff offline! Right now, I have to resort to marking the interesting items as Unread and hope that I remember to come back to it. While some forum technologies (like the forums used in developerWorks) already allow for offline replies to threads, this is not mainstream.

I know that each day we are moving closer to a pervasive online world. American Airlines is already piloting a product for in-flight internet. Still, this is still years away. A decade maybe.

Pervasiveness drives adoption

Based on my experience, one of the key factors for social software adoption is the ability to use those tools from anywhere. Lotus Connections , for example, does a good job at that because it can be used from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, BlackBerry, Portal, Notes, Sametime, Windows Explorer, etc. You can even take the social task management component (Activities) and use it completely offline! And, of course, (like with 99% of blog engines), I can compose blog entries while offline.

The capability to reply to content offline would be huge and would contribute to social software adoption. I hope all Enterprise 2.0 vendors make an effort to provide and/or augment this capability in their products soon!

I'm sorry

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How To Load Users From a Spreadsheet

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Seems like this week is all about TDI (Tivoli Directory Integrator). On Tuesday, I blogged about how to load photos from LDAP into Lotus Connections. Today, I want to show you how to load data from an existing spreadsheet into Lotus Connections. And, of course, with no coding whatsoever!

This post is also motivated by another question asked in the Lotus Connections Forum. In it, a customer explains how he was planning to export some data from an existing database into a CSV file and from there was wondering how to get the data into the system. I actually had recorded a video on how to do this and posted it internally (since it contained some sensitive data). That video is one of the most downloaded files that I have. Therefore, I decided to re-record the demo and post it here for you guys.

Ready? I've heard that pictures (or in this case, a video) speak louder than words, so go ahead and take a peek at this video.

Want to learn more about TDI? Check out the TDI Users page, which is what I first used when I wanted to learn more about TDI. Hope you found this valuable.

Why I love Blogs... a video!

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Remember my "Why I love social software..." series? A similar series is currently underway inside the company. Other IBMers had already shared their story on Wikis and Social Bookmarking (Dogear). I was disappointed that someone had beaten me to the Dogear story, but to be fair, I fell in love with social software first via Blogs.

This video is the same story that I blogged about a year and a half ago: how one random blog post that I did let me to meet a new colleague and get my problem solved!!

Now there's a bit of a story to this. First, I discovered this internal series, because it suddenly showed up in my feed reader (because I was subscribed to everything 'connections'). When I saw the blog entry of someone's video, I posted a comment and mentioned how I had a similar series going. The IBMer who was hosting the series asked me to record a 1 minute story (audio only) and he would do the rest.

I was very thankful that he did not ask me to record the video. My video skills are, well, nowhere to be found. Without social software, I would've never been able to put something so cool like this together.

So, I recorded an MP3 using my Mac's GarageBand application, sent it to him and voilá. So with social software, I was able to expand my social network, and we were able to be more effective at our job and put our skills to use in what we are best to create some new collateral! You gotta love social software!!

Very cool, eh? What's your social software story ?

How To Load Existing Photos into Lotus Connections

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Recently, a friend asked a very interesting question in the Lotus Connections forum. In his question, he wondered if there was any way to load photos into Lotus Connections Profiles. More specifically, he wanted to know how to load existing photos stored in the LDAP (in the jpegPhoto attribute). Out of the box, you are given scripts to load photos from the file system, but not from the LDAP.

In my experience, about half of our customers already have photos for their employees in some kind of system. Perhaps in their LDAP... Or in their HR Badge System... Or in some other in-house application. Therefore, I often find myself helping our customers create a custom "script" that fits their needs.

In an effort to spread the "wealth", I thought this was a great opportunity to show you how powerful Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) really is and teach you how to use it to the max. TDI is an ETL tool, which lets you extract information from pretty much any data source, transform it (if needed), and load it into Lotus Connections. And best of all, you don't have to do any coding! Since TDI is included for free as part of your Lotus Connections, I believe this is one of the key added value features of Lotus Connections.

Anyway, now, perhaps you are thinking "I don't have any skills in TDI, how am I ever going to figure this out?" Don't worry, I'm including a video here. It shows you how to load photos from your LDAP and, best of all, this takes less than 5 minutes!

If you would like detailed instructions on how to do this, follow the steps in my answer in the forum.

Social Software Adoption Is Like Having A Baby

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Are you excited about social software ? You should be... Are you scared of how to deploy it internally in your organization ? I understand. I talk to customers on a daily basis and this is their #1 concern! While viral adoption will happen with a useful social software solution it still takes time. And then comes the question... what does adoption mean ? Is it that 50% of users are actively blogging? Or perhaps that 33% of users actively tag pages ? Or maybe that at least 75% of users keep their profile up-to-date? As an example, Technorati says there are over 6 million blogs. That's about a 10% adoption rate for blogs worldwide.

This all depends on you! You (and your organization) define what adoption means. Enterprise social software is "new", and you are not only worrying about your adoption of this "baby", but also about the adoption of this "baby" throughout your organization.

As a recent dad, I can identify. I was very nervous about becoming a dad and I wanted to make sure that I be the best dad ever. I decided to educate myself and learn from others. To do this, in part, I read more baby books than my wife! But I digress...

How can you educate yourself? How can you learn from others? How can you leverage what has worked and what hasn't ? Easy! Take a peek at this article . It describes some of the recommended practices by IBM when deploying social software inside of the enterprise.

Here are some of the highlights:

In setting expectations for the pilot, it is important to realise that not everyone needs to be an active contributor. Analysts have identified a pattern of 90:9:1 where 90% of users are lurkers/readers, 9% are active participants, and 1% are early adopters and evangelists.

Brainstorm with your advocates and early adopters in the pilot about the most appropriate use of the tools for your organization. What user scenarios make sense in your organizational culture? What kind of content and personality do you want to encourage?

...if you are piloting on a large scale, a more accurate approach called a social network analysis (SNA) will uncover advocates that you never knew existed. SNA is a set of methods that reveal connections among people important for information-sharing, decision-making, and innovation.

...don't rely solely on your advocates for publicity. Use a combination of viral (word-of- mouth) marketing with more traditional mass-marketing approaches. Advertise your new social networking environment using traditional methods such as e-mail announcements and a feature story on your intranet homepage.

Hope you like it!

Social Software as SaaS helps adoption!

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Ready to start with social software but don't want to wait to order servers, configure them, set them up, customize the environment, and add your theme/branding to it ? Perhaps you are not ready to learn about WebSphere ? Perhaps your IT department is overloaded resolving some other fires issues at this time.

That's ok. IBM Premier Business Partner Connectria has just announced their new offering. They are offering Lotus Connections as Software as a Service (SaaS). Along with their existing Lotus Hosting services, they can now host and operate your web 2.0 and social networking environment while giving you the peace of mind of a 24/7 monitored system. And yes, they can do both a pilot and production environment!

Let them worry about all the techie stuff and let's focus on the adoption strategy for your organization. To find out more, check out the IBM Lotus Connections Hosting page on the Connectria site.

By the way, in case you are wondering, yes, I have recently posted several entries on solutions created by business partners. In fact, if my math is right, in the past month, the Lotus Connections Solution Catalog has grown ~40%! I think it's a great testament that so many 3rd party vendors see the power and the value of Lotus Connections that they want to provide their solutions on top of the Lotus Connections Social Networking Platform!

And there a couple more solutions coming down the pipeline, but I can't talk about them yet. So stay tuned!

Update 10/16/2008 @ 10:26pm: I was just informed that another business partner is offering hosting solutions for Lotus Connections. In this case it's Prominic.NET and their solution was just added to the catalog. Or you can go directly to Prominic's site and view their services here.

How to change the logout URL for Lotus Connections

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The other day, a customer asked me how to change the logout URL for Lotus Connections. They wanted to configure Lotus Connections so that when a user clicked on 'Log out' they would be redirected to the company's intranet home page.

I couldn't find any documentation out there, so I put on my hacker hat. After a couple of minutes (ok, maybe 30 minutes), I was able to figure it out. I decided to capture my changes and share it with you. You'll notice that while the process may look long, it's really only changing 1 line of code in 6 different files... so it's really easy!

Activities and Home page:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Activities.ear\oawebui.war\WEB-INF\jsps\html_prototype\fragments\mainpage
2. Save a backup of banner.jsp
3. Open banner.jsp with your favorite text editor
4. Look for the following lines:
   
   

   <form method="post" action="ibm_security_logout" name="logout" id="logoutForm" style="display: none;" > <input type="hidden" name="logoutExitPage" value="/service/html/mainpage"> <input type="submit" name="logout" value="Logout"> </form>

   
   
5. Change the logoutExitPage parameter as shown below:
   
   

   <form method="post" action="ibm_security_logout" name="logout" id="logoutForm" style="display: none;" > <input type="hidden" name="logoutExitPage" value="http://w3.acme.com/home"> <input type="submit" name="logout" value="Logout"> </form>

   
   
6. Save the file
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for the following file:
   • <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Homepage.ear\dboard.war\web\jsp\pageheader.jspf (touch main.jsp afterwards to force recompilations of the JSP fragment)

Blogs:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\roller-ui
2. Save a backup of logout-redirect.jsp
3. Open logout-redirect.jsp with your favorite text editor
4. Look for the following line:
   
   

   response.sendRedirect(request.getContextPath() + "/ibm_security_logout?logoutExitPage=" + "/");

   
   
5. Change the logoutExitPage parameter as shown below:
   
   

   response.sendRedirect(request.getContextPath() + "/ibm_security_logout?logoutExitPage=" + "http://w3.acme.com/home");

   
   
6. Save the file

Communities:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Communities.ear\tango.web.ui.war\WEB-INF\jsps\html\scenes\dashboard
2. Save a backup of banner.jsp
3. Open banner.jsp with your favorite text editor
4. Look for the following line:
   
   

   logoutSection.innerHTML ='<html:link page="/service/html/logout"><fmt:message key="link.logout" /></html:link>';

   
   
5. Change the page parameter as shown below:
   
   

   logoutSection.innerHTML ='<html:link page="/ibm_security_logout?logoutExitPage=http://w3.acme.com/home"><fmt:message key="link.logout" /></html:link>';

   
   
6. Save the file

Dogear:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Dogear.ear\dogear.webui.war\h3\jsp\main
2. Save a backup of pageHeader.jspf
3. Open pageHeader.jspf with your favorite text editor
4. Look for the following line:
   
   

   logoutSection.innerHTML =<jscript:string><a title="<fmt:message key="jspf.menu.logout.title"/>" href="<c:url value="/logout" />"><fmt:message key = "jspf.menu.settings.logout"/></a></jscript:string>;

   
   
5. Change the value parameter as shown below:
   
   

   logoutSection.innerHTML =<jscript:string><a title="<fmt:message key="jspf.menu.logout.title"/>" href="<c:url value="/ibm_security_logout?logoutExitPage=http://w3.acme.com/home />"><fmt:message key = "jspf.menu.settings.logout"/></a></jscript:string>;

   
   
6. Save the file
7. Touch h3.jsp (to force recompilation of the JSP fragment)

Profiles:

1. Go to <WAS_PROFILE_ROOT>\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Profiles.ear\peoplepages.war\WEB-INF\jsps\ajax
2. Save a backup of loginInfo.jspf
3. Open loginInfo.jspf with your favorite text editor
4. Look for the following line:
   
   

   <html:link page="/ibm_security_logout?logoutExitPage=/index.jsp" styleId="logoutLink">

   
   
5. Change the logoutExitPage parameter as shown below:
   
   

   <html:link page="/ibm_security_logout?logoutExitPage=http://w3.acme.com/home" styleId="logoutLink">

   
   
6. Save the file

Hope this is useful to you.