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Monday, November 30, 2009

Updating your Lotus Connections microblog programmatically

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This post is very techie. It comes as a reader recently asked me to share the code that I use to programmatically update my microblog (or status) in Lotus Connections. The following code is using Java and Abdera, but should be easily portable to other platforms like Adobe AIR. The Lotus Connections Profiles API documentation was helpful when I was trying to figure this out.

  1. Initialize the Abdera library
    // Initialize the Atom Client to update the status in Connections
    Abdera abdera = new Abdera();
    AbderaClient client = new AbderaClient(abdera);
    AbderaClient.registerTrustManager();
    try
    {
    client.addCredentials("http://connections.tap.ibm.com", null, null, new UsernamePasswordCredentials(username, password));
    }
    catch (URISyntaxException e)
    {
    e.printStackTrace();
    }
    
  2. Create the Atom entry to post to Lotus Connections


    Parser parser = abdera.getParser();
    String urlText = "https://connections.tap.ibm.com/profiles/atom/mv/thebuzz/entry/status.do?email=" + username;
    // Create the Atom entry with the new status message
    Entry status = abdera.newEntry();
    status.addCategory("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/type", "entry", null);
    status.addCategory("http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/sn/message-type", "status", null);
    message = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(message);
    status.setContent(message);


  3. Post the Atom entry
    // Send the new status message to Connections
    ClientResponse response = client.put(urlText, status);
    
  4. Check the return code
    if (response.getType() == ResponseType.SUCCESS)
    {
    // yipee
    System.out.println("woo hoo");
    }
    else
    {
    // WTH?
    System.out.println("oh no!");
    }
    

Hope this helps.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Tri-State LUG: Extending Lotus Connections to Domino with TDI

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As I mentioned last week, on Monday I participated in my first LUG: Lotus User Group. I was cordially invited to participate in the Tri-State Lotus User Group meeting. I could only stay for the morning. I got to enjoy Bob Picciano's keynote before my session. You can find a summary of Bob's keynote in Chris' blog.

My presentation was about using Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) with Lotus Connections and Domino. TDI is a free piece of software that's included with both Lotus Connections and Domino v8+. It's a great toolkit to easily move data from/to Domino to/from Lotus Connections. I used the following presentation to introduce my demo.

While I don't have a formal recording, I do have other blog entries with recordings that show how to use TDI to quickly import data to Lotus Connections. The videos are: How To Load Users from a Spreadsheet and How To Load Photos from LDAP.

To the first person who asked me a question, I gave away a copy of Web 2.0 and Social Networking for the Enterprise, Joey Bernal's new book which includes a foreword by Jeff Schick, VP of Social Software at IBM. I was one of the technical editors so got two copies and decided to give away my extra one .


Enjoy!

Monday, November 2, 2009

IT Superstar of 2009: Luis Benitez

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Thank you all for your support!

If you want to nominate someone else as the IT Superstart of 2009, go here: http://www.ibm.com/vrm/itsuper_etp_recipient_2250IN/LBenitez194164846