AusLUG 2011 Customising IBM Connections Presentation

AusLUG was an awesome event! Here is one of the 3 presentations I was fortunate enough to do. Slideshare didn't quite import the .odp file correctly but you get the majority of it.

Auslug 2011 customising ibm connections

View more presentations from adambrownaus.

Wildfire 1.5 is now available

Very pleased to announce the next release of Wildfire. It has been a long time coming and we have resolved a few of the requests people had asked for.

Most notably for me is better support for Win 7 64 bit. We had an issue here where it kept forgetting the accounts that had been setup. Sorted!

As of a couple of days ago we had 3500 downloads of Wildfire from OpenNTF. We have no idea how many of these then get installed across a user base and how many are just single installs but we would love to hear if you are using Wildfire so please let us know.

Here is the list of improvements:

New Preferences Location

We have made quite a big change to the way your settings are saved in this release.  WildFire! no longer uses a configuration file to store your accounts, passwords and groups.  There have been a number of posts about issues with the plug-in loosing settings, which came down to the randomisation of the configuration file locations on some machines. This meant that the configuration file for WildFire! could get 'lost'.

By moving the configuration/preferences for WildFire! into the users Personal Address Book (Contacts/Names.nsf) as account documents, we have also gained the added benefit for roaming users that your account settings will follow you from machine to machine, and they they are backed up as part of your normal Notes back-up routine.

We have automated the process for transferring the accounts from the configuration file to your PAB, WildFire! will do this automatically for you the first time you load the new version, and the configuration file will be backed up into your operating system's user 'Home' folder as "StatusUpdaterConfig.old".

Twitter Direct Messages:

One thing that a couple of users have noticed missing in the past few weeks is the absence of Twitter Direct Messages (both sent and received) in your WildFire! time-line.  After some investigation, we found that there wasn't actually any issue with the code, Twitter had just changed the Auth process through their API to explicitly require Auth for access to your Direct Message stream.

The solution is quite simple, open your WildFire! preferences, choose your Twitter account(s), and choose to "Get PIN" again.  This will re-authorise WildFire! with the new access level that will again mean you can see, send, and reply to Twitter direct messages in your WildFire! plug-in again.

Feed updates:

With some changes in the SocialText, Facebook and Connections API's, we needed to modify the way the streams from those accounts were being parsed by the plug-in, if you've noticed some additional information appearing in your WildFire! feeds lately, those are resolved with the upgrade to WildFire! 1.5.

Facebook enhancements:

WildFire! 1.5 now has the ability to both "Comment" on and "Like" posts being retrieved from your Facebook account(s).

IBM Connections enhancements:

WildFire! 1.5 now has the ability to "Comment" on posts being retrieved from your IBM Connections account(s).

Usability improvements:

Posts: Should a post not be successfully sent to any account, we now give a warning that this has happened, and maintain the text of the post in the "Status" field, so that you can post your comment again later, we also inform you which account was affected.

Inactive Accounts: Should you attempt to send a reply, comment, like, etc... to an account that is currently not activated for posts (eg: Twitter is active, but Connections is not and you attempt to post a comment on that Connections account) the status will flash, and the progress bar not move at all as a reminder for you to activate the correct account.

IBM Connections 3.0.1 Duplicate Emails

There is an issue with clustered environments of Connections 3.0.1 where the Daily and Weekly emails are sent multiple times (once for each node in the cluster). This issue existed in 3.0 (See here) however was resolved with and iFix LO60006 however the same problem exists with 3.0.1.

Upon downloading LO60006 from Fix Central and trying to apply it the update installer indicates that it is not a supported iFix on 3.0.1.

With a little assistance from my good friend Dave Hay I was able to find out that a version of LO60006 existed however you need to request it specifically from IBM via a PMR. Simply tell them you need the 3.0.1 version of the iFix and they should email it to you.

Once the correct iFix was installed problem of Duplicate emails was resolved!

AUSLUG Sessions!

Just noticed the awesome organisers of AUSLUG have updated the web site to list some of the sessions. I am very pleased to see two of my proposed sessions around IBM Connections have been accepted!

Connections out of the box is AWESOME, but just a few tweaks will make it a PERFECT fit for your organisation

 

There is a lot that can be done by Administrators without needed to change any core Connections code: Want to customise Profiles to add custom attibutes? Want to hide some fields or make some read only? Want to customise Search and what is displayed in search results? Want to populate extra data from data sources other than your LDAP? Want to populate photo's? Want to change the interface, add your logo, change the colour theme, turn features on or off, hide specific widgets? Add some widgets? or do you want to get hard core and customise the API so it contains your extra data? Or even get really hard core and customise the JSP's of Connections?

and

The business value of Social Software

This session outlines the real business value of social software with specific use cases of IBM Connections 3.0.1. The session will firstly outline a number of business outcomes that can be achieved by leveraging social software and then outline some key strategies to driving user adoption. This session will be done using LIVE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS for Demos.

I am excited to see that Mat and the AUSLUG team are pulling together what seems to be an outstanding event. I am looking forward to spending a few days with fellow Lotus/ICS evangelists and learning from the other speakers.

 

It is also great to see such a strong communities of partners get behind the event and the Australian community. We all do amazing things with IBM software so it will be great to leverage and learn from each others.

 

Now I had better get on and start preparing my slide decks!

IBM Connections - Importing Activity Templates & changing the owner

There are some great Activity Templates avaliable for FREE for IBM Connections in the IBM Lotus and WebSphere Portal Business Solutions Catalog.

They are a great start and quite useful for doing a demo of the capabilities of IBM Connections Activities. To install them you just need to:

1. Download them and unzip them into a temp directory on your Connections server (need to put them onto one of your actual Connections nodes)
2. On your Deployment Manager go to your \WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\<your DMGR profile name>\bin\ directory.
3. Enter the following command to start the wsadmin tool: (See the Administering Lotus Connections section of the Lotus Connections information center or the WebSphere Application Server information center for more information about the wsadmin tool.)
   
   AIX® / Linux®:
   ./wsadmin.sh -lang jython -user <admin_user_id> -password
   <admin_password> -port <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port>
   
   Microsoft® Windows®:
   wsadmin -lang jython -user <admin_user_id> -password
   <admin_password> -port <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port>
   where: <admin_user_id> is the user name of the WebSphere Application Server administrator.
   <admin_password> is the password of the WebSphere Application Server administrator.
   <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port> is the SOAP port for the WebSphere Application Server.
   
   
4. At the wsadmin command prompt, enter the following commands to import the templates:
   
   execfile("activitiesAdmin.py")
   templates = ArchiveService.fetchActivities ("<ZIP_files_directory>")
   ArchiveService.importActivities("<ZIP_files_directory>", templates)
   where <ZIP_files_directory> is the directory in which the template ZIP files are stored.
5. If the wsadmin console returns an empty vector ([]), no errors occurred during the import.
   See the Administering Lotus Connections section of the Lotus Connections information center or the WebSphere Application Server information center for more information about the wsadmin tool. Also, the Import operation will write status messages to the SystemOut.log file. You may also check this log file to confirm that the import completed successfully.

And that is it, the tempates will be available for users to use. When they go to create an Activity they can choose one of the following templates:

Now if you want to modify one of the template you need to change the Owner of the template. This is again done using the wsadmin tool:

1. On your Deployment Manager go to your \WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\<your DMGR profile name>\bin\ directory.
2. Enter the following command to start the wsadmin tool: (See the Administering Lotus Connections section of the Lotus Connections information center or the WebSphere Application Server information center for more information about the wsadmin tool.)
   
   AIX® / Linux®:
   ./wsadmin.sh -lang jython -user <admin_user_id> -password
   <admin_password> -port <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port>
   
   Microsoft® Windows®:
   wsadmin -lang jython -user <admin_user_id> -password
   <admin_password> -port <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port>
   where: <admin_user_id> is the user name of the WebSphere Application Server administrator.
   <admin_password> is the password of the WebSphere Application Server administrator.
   <SOAP_CONNECTOR_ADDRESS Port> is the SOAP port for the WebSphere Application Server.
   
   
3. At the wsadmin command prompt, enter the following commands to set the user you are changing and to then get the activities that are owned by that user:
   
   execfile("activitiesAdmin.py")
   
   templateadmin=ActivitiesMemberService.fetchMemberByEmail("Activities Administrator")
   
   
4. Then we enter the following command to get the user you want to set as the Template Ownder:
   
   newowner=ActivitiesMemberService.fetchMemberByEmail("abrown@isw.net.au")
   
   
5. Then we fetch all Activity Templates that are Owned by templateAdmin and lastly set the newowner:
   
   activities=ActivityService.fetchActivitiesByMember(templateadmin)
   
   AccessControlService.setOwnerAccess(activities,newowner)

And now the owner of the imported templates has been set so that you can edit and modify the templates as you like. Neat!