Enabling notifications for IBM Lotus Connections Bookmarks within the IBM Lotus Notes client 

Introduction to bookmarking

The term “bookmark” refers to a stored Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that can be used to quickly retrieve a Web page in the future.

Social collaboration supports shared bookmarks that let users with similar interests share Web resources or to store their bookmarks so that they are not tied to one specific computer or browser. Web-based bookmarking services let users save bookmarks on a remote Web server, accessible from anywhere.

Bookmarks in Lotus Connections

The Bookmarks service is a set of social bookmarking tools that you can use to save, organize, and share Internet and intranet bookmarks. Bookmarks that you collect are stored in a central repository for your convenience, so that you can share some or all of your bookmarks with others, and see other collections of bookmarks.

In a work environment, this tool is a great way to share expertise. Bookmarks provides tools for scanning for information about a bookmark or about the bookmark owner, allowing you to share information in your enterprise or connect with people who have similar interests or the expertise you need.

Some highlights of Bookmarks include:

• A central spot for storing and organizing bookmarks

• A way to publish some or all of your bookmarks so that others can see your collection

• Tags that let you identify bookmarks with a keyword that you choose. Tags make searching for and sharing bookmarks easier

• Authentication with an enterprise directory to provide boundaries to the social network

• Contact information provided about bookmark owners so that you can locate and connect with other users

Figure 1 shows a New Bookmark window, enabled for Public access.

Figure 1. New Bookmark window



Once you've bookmarked a Web page with Public access, you can explicitly notify other users of such a bookmark by using the “Notify other users” option (see figure 2).

When configured, this operation sends an email with bookmark details and shows a Notification on the Connections Home Page.

Figure 2. Notify other users option

Bookmarking in Lotus Connections from Lotus Notes

One of the objectives of integrating Lotus Notes with Lotus Connections is to socialize the Notes client, such that people can share information, documents, etc., quickly and efficiently.
The current integration of Lotus Notes and Lotus Connections allows you to bookmark your documents (emails, Teamroom documents, etc.), using the Bookmarks service of Lotus Connections. This service allows the user to specify tags, add a description, and make the bookmark private.

You can invoke bookmarking in Lotus Notes by right-clicking a Notes document, such as an email or a calendar entry, and filling in the fields in the New Dogear Bookmark window (see figure 3).

Figure 3. New Dogear Bookmark window



If you want to share the bookmark with friends or colleagues immediately, you must manually copy the bookmark URL from the browser and mail it to the people you want to notify.

It would be nice to simplify this process and automatically notify people, as is done from the Connections Web UI. In fact, there is a hidden feature in the Notes 8.5.1 client that takes care of this. The new mechanism allows you to specify the people who should be notified when creating the bookmark.

Enabling the new mechanism for your Notes client

Follow the steps below to enable this feature:

1. Browse to your Notes installation and then navigate to the
   \framework\shared\eclipse\plugins location. For example, on Microsoft® Windows® this location could be:
   C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins\
2. Search for a plug-in named com.ibm.openactivities.client.common.service
3. Edit plugin.properties under of this plugin, changing the property “dogear.disable.notification:” to dogear.disable.notification=false
   (NOTE: ‘dogear’ is the former name of the Connections Bookmark service)
4. Restart the Notes client.

A new field titled "Notify Users" displays below the Description field. The new field supports type-ahead and uses the LDAP information from the Connections Activities service. You can also manually add any email address, separating multiple email addresses with a comma (see figure 4).

Figure 4. Notify Users field



Sharing of private bookmarks in not allowed in Lotus Connections; as such, the Notify Users field will be grayed out for bookmarks that are created with Private access (see figure 5).

Figure 5. Notify Users field when Private access enabled

Disabling the feature for your Notes client

Follow these steps to disable the feature:

1. Browse to your Notes installation and then navigate to \framework\shared\eclipse\plugins location. For example, on Windows this location could be:
   C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins\
2. Search for the plug-in named com.ibm.openactivities.client.common.service.
3. Edit plugin.properties under of this plugin, changing the property “dogear.disable.notification:” to dogear.disable.notification=true
   (NOTE: ‘dogear’ is the former name of the Connections Bookmark service)
4. Restart the Notes client.

Limitations

• The feature will show up even though the notification of bookmarks might be disabled on the Connections server and, in this case, it will silently fail. You can verify if the feature is available by going to Connections bookmarks from a browser and checking if the sending notification option is present (refer to the figures above).

• The type-ahead feature is leveraged from the Activities service, so people not using Activities might not show up in this list by default. In this case you might need to manually add the email address.

• IBM provides these materials without obligation of support.

Resources

developerWorks Lotus Connections product page:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/connections/

developerWorks Lotus Notes product page:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/notesdomino/

IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 Reviewer's Guide:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/connections/dw-l-reviewersguide/

Lotus Notes wiki:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf

Lotus Connections Support Portal page:
http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/support/

Lotus Connections Forum:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcforum.nsf?OpenDatabase

Lotus Notes documentation page:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/notes/

About the authors

Christof Luecking has been working in software development at IBM for 10 years and is currently the architect for the Lotus Connections Extensions. His team address the integration of Lotus Connections with Lotus Notes, Sametime®, and Symphony^TM, as well as Microsoft Office, Outlook, SharePoint, and IBM WebSphere® Portal. He has an M.S. in mathematics, and his special interest is to create highly usable and reliable pieces of software. You can reach him at luecking@de.ibm.com.

Manish Kataria works for IBM, ISL Pune, on the Connections Linked Values Team as a Staff Software Engineer. Manish has been involved in developing Web and distributed applications, and he currently works on Lotus Connections integration with Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime. He holds B.Sc. degrees in computer science and advanced computing, and he's certified in Java. You can reach him at http://in.linkedin.com/in/mkataria or mkataria@in.ibm.com.