On April 9 of 2013, Luis Benitez announced on his blog that the IBM Connections portlets for IBM WebSphere Portal had been updated and were ready for download. During May 20 – 23, 2013, I was able to attend to the IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2013 Americas at the Hilton Chicago Hotel where more information was revealed of these new portlets.
I was particularly interested to know more about the portlet for the Activity Stream. The speakers showed a demo (a part of that demo is available here) of how it looks under IBM WebSphere Portal v8 and in resume:
- This portlet expose the same layout and functionality of the Activity Stream that can be found inside Connections v.4/4.5 (you can test it under IBM Greenhouse)
- This is because they reused the same code and just was adapted to run under IBM WebSphere Portal.
- So, you don´t lose any functionality or get new ones – (As expected)
- Is possible to pin it to a specific filter (i.e. a community) – (pretty cool!!)
- It will not work correctly in a mobile device since the pop-ups will not be displayed – (to bad!!)
- Consider to use the mobile version instead.
- Is possible to configure if you want that the pop-ups be displayed (Ok)
- Is possible to customize the look & feel of the portlet via CSS (too limited in my opinion)
- Uses embedded applications to enable full interaction model – (pretty cool!!)
Update: Thank you to Adam Ginsburg – Product Manager at IBM that allowed me to add some screenshots of this new portlet.
Hope you find this information useful!!
“IBM Connections is a social software platform that enables organizations to engage the right people, drive innovation, and deliver results”.
