Custom Sametime blackbox for bleedyellow.com

Over the last few days I have been working with Chris Whisonant from LOTUS911 / bleedyellow.com to write a custom Sametime blackbox for bleedyellow.com. In case you don’t know, a blackbox in “Sametime speak”, is what you write if you would like to get business card info from systems other than Domino Directory or LDAP.

This blackbox uses the DB2 JDBC drivers to plug into the Lotus Connections Profiles database at bleedyellow.com to get business card data from there. This means that if you update your bleedyellow.com profile with a photo your co-bleeders will now be able to see it when they hover their mouse over your name in Sametime.

Besides the photo we also surfase the blog-link and the timezone instead of company name and department as you can see in the screenshot below.

During my work with this blackbox and previous work I have done with the UserInfo API for two upcoming articles in THE VIEW on the same subject I have learned a lot of stuff, both good and bad, about the API. The API gives you a lot of flexibility but there are also major shortcomings so expect some blogging on this in the future. For now simply rejoice! 🙂

Now I invite you to update your Lotus Connections profile and share any comments you have on the hovering with me or Chris.

P.S.: I know there is a Lotus Connections plug-in for Sametime that provides hover-functionality from the Solution Catalog but I really wanted a server-based solution.

4 thoughts on “Custom Sametime blackbox for bleedyellow.com”

  4. First of all I don’t think the Connections Rest API provides you with access to the picture data though I could very well be wrong. The honest answer however is that it started as a use-case for writing your own Sametime blackboxes more than anything else and going directly to the database was easier to do and explain. I have been wanting to look into the LC API but haven’t gotten there yet unfortunately. Too much to do… 🙂

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