Lotusphere BoF - Working with the Lotus Connections API

Birds of a Feather: Working with the Lotus Connections API Sacha Chua ( [email_address] ) LivingAnAwesomeLife.com Opinions here are my own and not my employer’s. No warranty, express or implied.

Goal: Get you excited about what you can do with the Lotus Connections API!
You can do incredible things with the Lotus Connections API
I made a Community Toolkit that had a newsletter, metrics exporter, and data exporter. People found it really useful.
Good news! LC 3.0 documentation has more examples than the LC 2.5 InfoCenter (and it’s a wiki!). The examples will come in really handy when you build.
We’ll go on a quick tour of some things we’ve built informally, and then open it up to a discussion :
What are you working on?
What would you like to build?
What questions do you have?
What can help you build better?
What have you learned?
What can you share?

You can do pretty cool things with the Lotus Connections API!

Data available for Communities in Lotus Connections 2.5
Components: Blogs, Wikis, Files, Bookmarks, Feeds, Forums, Activities
Number of entries
Unique contributors
Average per community member
Average per contributor
Percentage of contribution (unique contributors / number of community members)
Views (blog – all time) / Downloads (files)
Comments (blogs) / Replies (forum)
Unique contributors in community

Tools
Newsletter
Metrics (# of contributions)
Community data exporter
Forum exporter
Blog exporter (can sort by # of votes)
Member activity breakdown
ATOM feed exporter (title, body, author, e-mail, date, link)
Community management (creating, updating, renaming, copying)
Member management (adding or removing members)
Bookmark list export
Bulk Profiles tagger
Ideas

Lessons learned working with Lotus Connections 2.5
You can do a whole lot with the Lotus Connections API!
The service document doesn’t list everything. If you need to work with anonymous APIs, you will need to customize some of the URLs.
Trust, but verify. Systems and documentation sometimes disagree.
Not everything is available through the API. For example, I haven’t figured out the API way to get the structure of a wiki. Maybe in 3.0?
Community news feeds don’t work for private communities.
New wiki entries require valid XHTML, with an enclosing element. If everything else gets created except for the wiki body, that’s why.

Resources
Lotus Connections 2.5 API http ://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ltscnnct/v2r0/index.jsp?topic=/ com.ibm.connections.25.help/c_api_welcome.html
Lotus Connections 3 product documentation http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Lotus_Connections_APIs_lc3
developerWorks > Lotus Connections http ://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/connections /
Sacha Chua ( [email_address] ) - LivingAnAwesomeLife.com
IBM Global Business Services Canada, Application Innovation Services

Let’s talk about what you can do with the Lotus Connections API, and how!
Newsletter
Metrics (# of contributions)
Community data exporter
Forum exporter
Blog exporter (can sort by # of votes)
Member activity breakdown
ATOM feed exporter (title, body, author, e-mail, date, link)
Community management (creating, updating, renaming, copying)
Member management (adding or removing members)
Bookmark list export
Bulk Profiles tagger
Ideas:

http://sachachua.com	99
http://static.slidesharecdn.com	24
http://dev.sachachua.com	3
url_unknown	2
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	2
http://feedproxy.google.com	1
http://feeds.feedburner.com	1

Lotusphere BoF - Working with the Lotus Connections API

by Sacha Chua

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Lotusphere BoF - Working with the Lotus Connections API Presentation Transcript