Ryan Baxter: The Introduction of OpenSocial at Lotusphere
January 27 2012
Ryan Baxter is a developer on the Lotus Notes team and a contributor to IBM's efforts around Open Social 2.0. Earlier this week, he wrote a nice blog entry covering Notes and Open Social-based embedded experiences:
One of the key uses of OpenSocial in Notes and Domino Social Edition and in Connections Next is embedded experiences. For those of you that don't know, embedded experiences allows you to embed the "experience" you would get in one application, in a completley different application. For example, it allows you to embed the experience from your favorite project management tool into an email, or an entry in an activity stream. This allows users to stay in context, and not have to jump back and forth between mutliple applications throughout the day. If you live in your inbox, you can stay there and get more work done without going off to multiple applicaitons throughout the day. For all of you that say Notes is not social, or email is not social, I disagree. Embedded experiences is email 2.0 and it allows email to become one of the most powerful and useful forms of communication in the organization!
The second most important benefit to adopting OpenSocial is its support for activity streams. It's important to understand that activity streams is its own specification. However activity streams needs OpenSocial. The activity streams spec just defines a data model, in other words it just defines what the activity stream should look like, there are no APIs. OpenSocial puts APIs ontop of this data model, allowing us to access the data. Connections Next exposes its activity stream through the APIs OpenSocial defines. In other words, the activity stream in Connections Next uses standards to expose its activity stream! IBM did not invent its own APIs we adhere to the specification.
One of the questions / discussions that I've seen a lot is whether you need IBM Connections to run the Notes/Domino Social Edition feature release. The answer is NO! You can, of course, use Notes Social Edition with Connections, but there is no requirement, with only one exception - serving Activity Streams to the Notes Social Edition home page. That's it. Of course you can use the Connections Files and Profiles entitlement that we've already provided with Notes 8.5.3, but no feature except Activity Streams has a requirement.
That's another way of saying that Notes/Domino Social Edition has plenty of new features on its own, including the embedded experiences which Ryan describes in so much detail in this and other blog postings. A major step forward in contextual collaboration.
Link: Ryan Baxter: Thoughts on Lotusphere 2012 >
You can also hear the latest Taking Notes podcast with Ryan along with Mikkel Heisterberg, #149, here >
Post a Comment
- 2
Ryan Baxter http://ryanjbaxter.com | 1/27/2012 4:39:04 PM
The video from the Social App Throwdown at Lotusphere 2012 has been posted, watch it here { Link }
- 3
Karsten Lehmann http://blog.mindoo.com | 1/28/2012 2:23:51 AM
Ed, are there any plans for an activity stream feature for the SMB market? As an ISV, it will be quite hard to sell IBM connections to companies with let's say 1-500 employees, although I would really see a benefit in an activity stream for them. They are happy with one server, Lotus Notes/Domino, and will probably not invest in licenses, hardware and support for two additional servers, DB2 and Websphere.
I know IBM is offering cloud solutions for this, but the German companies that I know want to have the data inhouse.
- 4
Christian Güdemann http://www.webgate.biz | 1/28/2012 6:34:51 AM
Ed, in my understanding, the activity stream is a part of the opensocial 2.0 specification. If this is so, it should be possible for Lotus Notes Social Edition to connect to every kind of server that is providing an activity stream, based on the opensocial specification?
- 5
John Jardin http://johnjardin.ukuvuma.co.za | 1/29/2012 11:00:55 PM
Hi Ed. This was an eye opener, and exactly what I needed to get myself understanding and working with OpenSocial 2.0.
I look very forward to Lotus Notes Social Edition.
Thanks.
- 6
Ryan Baxter http:///ryanjbaxter.com | 1/30/2012 6:29:04 AM
Christian and Karsten, your are right there are activity streams APIs that's are part of OpenSocial 2.0. We are still looking at what that means when Connections Next is not also on premise. In theory you could point N/D Social Edition at any OpenSocial 2.0 activity stream and use that, but we are not sure what the right approach is at this point. If you have ideas or use cases you want us to take into account please contact me. Besides the OpenSocial APIs this will also effect the home page, so I can see why this would be a concern...
- 7
JohN Foldager http://izone.dk | 2/1/2012 1:02:58 PM
@6 Ryan I think IBM should make sure that at least one other non-IBM OpenSocial 2.0 activity stream will work with Social Edition when it is released. I would hate to see IBM talk about "openes" if it is only open to another IBM product even though the specification should allow any product that use the same specification.
In case I'm getting blammed for any of the confusion around Notes Social Edition & Connections, I think I was clear in my post when I wrote: "The next version of Lotus Notes, named Social Edition will include a new Home Page featuring the same activity stream that is available to Connections users on the web. This new feature will require an IBM Connection server, but the pricing and licensing for that has not yet been announced." Sorry if I caused any grief.