Jay's awesome auto-magic News Feed tweak for IBM Connections

The other day Jay was looking for something to do with his spare moments in between finalising Kudos Analytics Cloud and Kudos Boards Mobile (come on Jay you don't really have spare time;) and he made an awesome tweak to our internal deployment of IBM Connections. I thought it was worth sharing so here it is:

There's no mechanism in Connections by default to notify people of new posts in the News Feed. Forcing users to refresh the page, or click on 'Discover' / 'I'm Following' to find out if something new has happened. 

I had an idea to solve this problem with a little javascript injection into the header.jsp. 

A couple of hours of coding and testing later, it actually worked as planned and is now implemented in our production environment (feedback welcome). 

What does it do?

A - Shows a button with 'X New Posts' at the top of the news feed (screenshot below)

B- Updates the page title, which lets you see if there are any updates without switching to the tab. (Also makes the tab glow if it is pinned - as seen on Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

How?

The script first checks to see if it's in Homepage on load. You don't want to make a request every X seconds from every page in connections.

It then periodically polls the RSS feed for the current stream to retrieve any entries since the time the page was loaded. (Thanks to Mr. Andrew "API" Welch for his input here)

If it finds any new entries, it shows a bar at the top indicating the number of new updates and, my favourite part, updates the document.title allowing you to see if there are any updates without the need to actually switch to the tab. 

You might need to refresh your homepage for it to take effect. And you might have to wait till there are some new posts as well :) 

 Code to implement this:

1. Put the activity-stream-notifier.jsp file in the same folder as the customised header.jsp. 
2. Add the following line at the end of your header.jsp:​  --%><%@ include file="./activity-stream-notifier.jsp" %><%--

The results are as per the below screenshot:

Well I think that is pretty neat. Hope you can make use of it!

Kudos Badges Embedded Experience - Connections-Tick Notes 9-Tick iNotes-Tick Mobile-Tick!

One of the great new features of IBM Connections 4 and the IBM Notes/iNotes 9 Social Edition clients is the addition of Open Social Gadgets and support for Embedded Experiences. This enables applications to provide in context integration so users can stay in the context of which ever client they are using and still interact with the application that is embedded. It really is awesome stuff and furthers extends IBM Connections as an application development platform.

So we here at ISW and Kudos Badges have taken full advantage of this new capability and developed a series of Open Social Gadgets that are used within the embedded experience across the various clients. Here is a video showing what we have done!

Come see us at IBM Connect at Booth C49 if you want to see it live or you can also catch us at The Social App Dev Throwdown!

An IBM Connect present.....Wildfire for IBM Notes 9 and Connections 4

Very pleased for Andrew Welch to provide this guest post:

WILDFIRE 1.6 IS NOW AVAILABLE

We are very pleased to announce the next release of WildFire. It has been a long time coming, but all good things come to those who wait and just in time for IBM Connect!

We have resolved a few of the issues that have arisen due to the life-cycles of the various Social Network APIs, as well as implementing a few requests from users.
Most notably here is the support for the XING network & custom feed background colors.

As of a couple of days ago we had 6835 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.

In other statistics, WildFire has made nearly 5 Million API calls to Facebook in the last year alone!


Here is the list of improvements:

New network support: XING
XING was both the first and most recent requested network.  With the recent launch of the Public API for XING we thought it was time to reward our loyal WildFire users.  Now you can both post and read statuses from the XING community!

Custom feed background colors
After the overwhelming positive responses of custom background colors in iWildFire, it was decided to bring them to WildFire as well.  This will make the biggest difference for those with multiple accounts of the same type.  Now you can easily tell at a glance which network the status was retrieved from

Facebook updates
Recently Facebook removed the Offline Access permission WildFire was using.  This meant that new Facebook accounts added to WildFire could not work for more than 2 hours.  In the new version of WildFire we have moved to Facebook's new authentication protocol and users now have 60 days access.  After this time simple repeat the account creation for another 60 days.

Additionally, we have added the following Facebook Feed enhancements;

• showing check-in locations
• showing people tags
• showing direct wall posts

Connections 4 support
WildFire 1.6 now supports IBM Connections 4.  You can now read and post status updates to your Connections 4 environments.  Additionally you can also comment upon posts.

LinkedIn improvements
WildFire 1.6 now supports new data structures introduced recently in LinkedIn.

IBM Notes 9 Support
WildFire 1.6 officially supports IBM Notes 9.

Performance improvements & General Bug Fixes
Some additional changes under the hood will speed up the rendering and reduce memory usage.

URL Shortening
WildFire has long supported automatic URL shortening by TinyURL when posting a status.  However, users reported trouble in keeping track of the amount of characters that had used.  With WildFire 1.6 we have added a more user friendly interface.  Simply paste a URL into the text area, or use the new keyboard short-cut (Alt+T) and the URL is automatically shortened.  This allows you to see the exact status message and length before it is sent.

Improved screen utilisation
Do you have limited screen real-estate and find yourself switching between widgets?

Users had reported their desire to keep an eye on their social feeds, but still wanting to display multiple widgets.
WildFire 1.6 includes the functionality to hide the Status Input field.  This means less wasted space and you never have to close WildFire again!

Reduced size
WildFire 1.6 is 20% smaller in size than previous versions.


In summary, WildFire 1.6 is worth the wait.  It's smaller, faster, more user friendly and connects you with more social networks than ever before!


Written by guest blogger;

Andrew Welch
Lead Developer of WildFire

Connect 2013: Booth C49
Twitter: @AndyLWelch
LinkedIn AndrewLWelch

IBM Connections Mobile App extension for Kudos Badges

Team Kudos has been busy working away on some great new initiatives in the lead up to IBM Connect 2013. One of the new capabilities that we have delivered is Kudos Badges Mobile. We have leveraged the new features that IBM provided with the IBM Connections 4 Mobile App that enable us to extend the App to include additional features, in this case Kudos Badges Mobile. This is a great capability as it provides seemless integration between IBM Connections Mobile App and Kudos Badges without the users having to have a separate App. We also have been able to leverage the authentication via the Connections App so users don't need to logon again.

One of the key strengths of Kudos Badges is that it has always tracked actions and behaviour for users of not only the Connections browser interface but also the Connections Mobile App (and the API usage for that matter). With the uptake of Mobile users continually increasing and IBM treating the Connections Mobile App as a first class user interface option, if you arn't measuring and rewarding your mobile users usage then you are missing a large portion of your audience. That is why we decided it was important to also provide the Kudos Badges Mobile App so our users can also participate and see how they rank with their peers.

Here are a few screen shots as well as a video providing a quick overview.

Kudos Badges Mobile AppKudos Badges Mobile App Menu

Kudos Badges Mobile App Badges

Kudos Badges Mobile App Leaderboard

Kudos Badges Mobile App Thanks

We have a few other exciting annoucements (....think IBM Notes Social Edition) to make over the next few days leading up to IBM Connect 2013. If you have any questions or would like to learn more you can contact us or come visit Team Kudos at Booth C49 at the IBM Connect conference.

Meet Ascendant Technology - Kudos Badges Partner based on US and Europe

Just a quick introduction to Ascendant Technology (Atech), ISW's latest Kudos Badges Partner. Atech is a leading US and European based IBM Premier Partner and are IBM Connections experts. They were also the recent winner of the Lotusphere 2012 CTO Award for their Socialize the Enterprise offering. Atech work with many clients implementing and supporting IBM Connections and understand the value of having strong user adoption strategies as part of any successful implementation of Connections. As such as ISW are please to appoint them as a Kudos Badges Partner.

Ascendant Technology (Atech) is a leading provider of end-to-end web-based solutions to enterprises worldwide. Atech creates business agility by accelerating the adoption and implementation of technology to increase the speed at which organizations innovate.

So if you have or are considering implementing IBM Connections and are interested in learning more about Kudos Badges then I encourage you to reach out to the team at Ascendant.