IBM still in the lead
I was pleasantly surprised to again see that IDC for the third year running is ranking IBM as the leader for enterprise social software. As a IBM business partner we too are seeing the increased demand for this transformational software although implementation and realization of the potential is oftentimes hard in smaller companies without the budget to drive adoption with community managers or evangelists. It will be interesting to follow this market and see when and if competitors will catch up. For now - good job IBM!!
Controlling the feature install location
When installing plugins (that is Eclipse features) into Lotus Notes and you're running a roaming environment you kind of have a problem. The problem is that the only part of the plugins that roam are the plugin settings (i.e. should the Sametime come of front on new IMs) but not the actual code for the plugin. That means that when a user roams to a new machine the plugin isn't installed and hence the user will experience that the plugin will start installing and prompt for a restart. This is because plugins are installed in what's termed the "user" location (ie. your workspace directory) and not in a shared location.
An alternative is to install the plugins in the "shared" location instead (on my laptop that would mean that features would go into C:\Notes8\framework\shared\eclipse\features instead of C:\Notes8\data\workspace\applications\eclipse\features). The "Controlling the feature install location" article from the Lotus Expeditor info center has a nice description on the 3 possible locations.
To do this you use what's called the colocation affinity of a feature and specify that in the feature.xml describing the feature (the feature.xml can be found inside the jar-file that makes up a feature). To do this you have two options - 1) edit the existing feature.xml and set the "colocation-affinity"-attribute of the top level "feature"-tag or 2) set it using the GUI editor when you build your feature. Option 2 is for those doing their own plugins and option 1 for those changing the colocation affinity for a 3rd party plugin.
Below is a screenshot of setting the colocation affinity to "com.ibm.rcp.site.anchor.shared.feature" driving the feature to the shared location using the GUI editor in Eclipse.
Please note that installing into the shared location require read/write access in the file system for that location.