About people awareness

IBM WebSphere Portal includes people awareness features, so that people's names can appear as hyperlinks that allow users to contact people with whom they might want to work.

Wherever person links appear, users can click the link to display a menu of actions for collaborating (contacting and working) with the person named by the link. If you, as administrator, have also configured an IBM Lotus Sametime server to work with WebSphere Portal, person links indicate the person's state

For example... available, away, and so on.

 

Person menu

Move the cursor over an active (underlined) person's name to see the Click for Person Card option, and then click Click for Person Card to see the Person menu. (If you are using a screen reader, you can press Shift + Enter to see the Person menu, and then press Tab to navigate through the Person menu.)

The actions that are visible on the person menu depend on whether Domino and Extended Products, the Lotus Collaborative Services, or both, are configured to work with WebSphere Portal.

The person's online status For example available, away, and so on appears only if Lotus Sametime is enabled. The Lotus Sametime status icon indicates whether a person is active, away, offline, or does not want to be disturbed.

Actions may also include:

• Show Profile

  Displays the person's profile in the organization directory, including (by default) business card information, contact information, current job, and background.

  The information in the business card section is distinct from the set of information you can configure to appear from a person link, so you may choose to display different information about people in each of these contexts.

• Send E-mail

  Opens a new message in the user's preferred e-mail client as specified in browser and operating system. This option appears only if the user has an e-mail address.

• Chat

  Appears only if Lotus Sametime is enabled. Action is not available if the person is offline or has set status to "Do not disturb me."

• Show in Organization View

  Appears if a portal administrator has selected "Include Organization View" when configuring the People Finder portlet. This action shows how the person fits into the organizational hierarchy.

• Add to Sametime List

  Appears only if Lotus Sametime is enabled. Action displays a window where a user can add the person to the contact list, as a member of a new or existing personal group.

For more information about Lotus Sametime client features, see the Lotus Sametime documentation. .

 

Online presence

If you have set up a Lotus Sametime server to work with WebSphere Portal, users can see each other's online presence in their person links according to the status options they have set in their Lotus Sametime client. When someone is offline, his or her status indicator in the person link indicates the Offline state.

 

People awareness and the Person tag

People awareness in the form of online presence (names displayed as hyperlinks) is supported by Collaborative Services. In some contexts, the Person menu is available; it is provided by the Person JSP tag. The Person tag provides contextual collaboration functionality related to a named person. It generates the HTML that renders both the specific set of actions to display on the Person menu and the online presence state to display for that person, taking into account the Domino and Extended Products servers that are installed and enabled in the portal environment.

For information on configuration of a collaborative portal, see the topic on integrating Lotus Domino and the Extended Product Portlets into WebSphere Portal. When you complete collaborative configuration, pay special attention to the Collaborative Services environment properties file, CSEnvironment.properties which supports people awareness.

For details on the implementation of the Person tag, and instructions on customizing the tag for WebSphere Portal applications that you develop, see the Collaborative Services API topic.

Users who are not in an LDAP do not have awareness and cannot see if other users are online. This can happen if you install your portal and then enable a Federated LDAP or Federated DB repository that does not contain that user. Also, users who sign up using the Self Care portlet do not have awareness.

 

Related concepts

Collaborative Services environment properties

 

Related tasks

Preserving people awareness features in a customized portal
Providing online awareness for a custom portlet
Customizing the person menu through the theme
Customizing the person menu through services
Integrating collaboration and messaging into WebSphere Portal

 

Related reference

Collaborative Services API
People Finder

 

Related information

Lotus Sametime documentation