Securing your Bookmarks in Lotus Connections

IBM Lotus Connections, by its very nature was designed with minimal access control. As a result, anyone who chooses to share information across the five services is well aware of the fact that what they chose to blog about, comment on, and bookmark is immediately visible to their entire social network. It would almost seem a bit impractical to impose limitations on a tool whose sole purpose is to facilitate open communication and in IBMs’ words not mine “collaboration without boundaries”. For better or worse this is how the product was designed. Don’t shoot the messenger.

That being said it can oftentimes be hard to teach an old dog a new trick. Or to put it more simply, tell one of those guys you run across in a meeting who has to tell you all about the time he fed punch cards through a mainframe (or whatever it is you do with punch cards) how to use the “world wide web”. Old-school mainframe guy aside, there will undoubtedly also be the wet blanket who insists on ruining all the fun by enforcing some structure or policing of all content. Either way, one will oftentimes face an uphill battle when selling Lotus Connections.

Now I am not condoning any of the aforementioned behavior but I am a technical sales specialist and so as a result do realize that sometimes, just sometimes, you gotta do what gotta do to make the customer happy, including grumpy guy in the back row, and just sell some darn software.

So in this post I will allude to a possible solution for one common use case that is not immediately addressed with an “out of box” Connections installation but can be with just a slight bit of creativity. I am just finishing a whitepaper with a colleague of mine that will be out shortly that will go into great detail and be a “how to” of sorts but in the interim you will just have to give it a go on your own. The following describes a common request by many an IBM customer:

Company XYZ, is a large retail establishment that runs a “Vendor Portal” supporting multiple vendors. In an effort to attract additional vendors by being all hip and trendy, Company XYZ has decided to add a social networking capability to their Portal – specifically a bookmarking and tagging service. Queue Lotus Connections Dogear Service. The challenge, however, is that no vendor is allowed to see the bookmarks created by another vendor. Yikes, now how are they gonna do that?

…By first familiarizing themselves with the concept of a portlet, with all its bells and whistles (i.e. the ability to create a single portlet application that can be customized to display different content to different people), and to an IDE called WebSphere Portlet Factory.

You see, the service within Lotus Connections that does have a bit of an access-control model is the Communities Service. And oh! Communities have bookmarks! So, what one could do is to create a community for each Vendor and then moderate this Community so that only Vendor A is allowed into Vendor A’s community and so on and so forth. Now as an employee of Vendor A, when I dogear something, it will only be added to the community to which I am a member. Therefore I am not “sharing” bookmarks with another vendor. Genius! And since a Community is represented by a uuid and a portlet can be access controlled, customized and personalized I can do some fancy pants coding on my portlet to guarantee there is never any cross-contamination of bookmarks. Problem solved!

The only piece missing is understanding how to custom develop all this. And for that you will have to wait. In the meantime you can check out the samples on the WebSphere Portlet Factory Wiki and just imagine all the cool stuff you can develop with Lotus Connections by just becoming acquainted with the REST Call Builder.

Once we finish the article I will include a link to it here. Stay tuned and happy coding!