People awareness
WebSphere Portal includes people awareness features, so that people's names can appear in portlets as hyperlinks that allow users to contact people with whom they might want to work. Wherever person links appear, portal 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 portal administrator, have also configured an IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing server to work with the portal, person links indicate whether a person is active, away, offline, or in a Do Not Disturb state.
Person menu
When portal users click the name of (or the icon for) a person, a menu appears that provides actions linking them to other portal users. The actions that are visible on the person menu depend on the following factors:
- Whether Domino and Extended Products, the Collaboration Center, or both, are set up to work with the portal.
- The online status (Active, Away, Do Not Disturb, Offline) of the person appears only if Lotus Instant Messaging is enabled. The Lotus Instant Messaging status icon indicates whether a person is active, away, offline, or does not want to be disturbed.
Actions may include:
- Start Chat...
Appears only if Lotus Instant Messaging is enabled. Action is not available if the person is offline.
- Send E-mail...
Opens a new message in the user's preferred e-mail client as specified in browser and operating system.
- Add to Instant Contacts...
Appears only if Lotus Instant Messaging is enabled. Action displays a window where you can add the person to your Lotus Instant Messaging List, as a member of a new or existing personal group.
- Show Person Record
Appears only if Collaboration Center features are installed and the People Finder portlet is on the current page. Action displays the person's record, including (by default) business card information, contact information, current job, and background.
Note 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.
- Show in Organization View
Appears in the People Finder portlet if Collaboration Center features are installed, and portal administrators have chosen to enable this feature. Action opens the person's organizational context. The Organization View shows how the person fits into the organizational hierarchy.
For more information about Lotus Instant Messaging product features, see Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing End User Help, available from the IBM Lotus Documentation site.
Online presence
If you have set up a Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing server to work with the portal, portal users can see each other's online presence in their people links according to the status options they have set in their Lotus Instant Messaging client:
- I am active.
- I am away or not using the computer now.
- Do not disturb me.
Note: When someone is offline, his or her status indicator in the person link indicates the Offline state.
Remind portal users who have the Lotus Instant Messaging Connect client that they can select Options - Preferences - Status in their client software to customize the messages that appear for each online state, and to control the period of time in which keyboard or mouse inactivity automatically switches their status from Active to Away.
People awareness and the Person tag
People awareness in the form of online presence (names displayed as hyperlinks) in WebSphere Portal is supported by Lotus Collaborative Services. In some contexts, the Person menu is available; the Person menu 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 and servers that are installed and enabled in the portal environment.
There are alternate methods of configuring awareness and chat features for some Lotus collaborative portlets, such as Inline Team Workplaces. For more information, see the documentation on each individual portlet in Collaborative portlets under See also.
For information on configuration of a collaborative portal, see Getting started with collaboration, and when you complete collaborative configuration, pay special attention to Additional configuration for collaboration, which describes modifications to the CSEnvironment.properties file that support people awareness.
For details on the implementation of the Person tag, and instructions on customizing the tag for portal applications that you develop, see Collaborative Services API under See also.
Configurable contact information on person links
When users click a person link, the Person menu displays a set of contact information about the selected person (such as telephone number) that is now configurable through the CSEnvironment.properties file. You can specify the WebSphere Member Manager attributes corresponding to fields you want to display in the person link contact information, and control the order in which the items of information appear.
Perform the following actions:
- Open the file CSEnvironment.properties from the following location:
PORTAL_ROOT/shared/config- Locate the CS_SERVER_PERSONTAG.businessCardItems property.
- Modify the string after the property with valid Member Manager attributes separated by commas (,). The items appear when a person link is clicked, top to bottom, in the same order in which you type them.
- Save the properties file.
- Restart the portal server.
Default attributes are:
- jobTitle
- roomNumber
- telephoneNumber
WebSphere Member Manager attributes valid for including in person link contact information are:
- businessCategory
- carLicense
- cn
- countryName
- departmentNumber
- description
- displayName
- employeeNumber
- employeeType
- facsimileTelephoneNumber
- givenName
- homePostalAddress
- ibm-gender
- ibm-generationQualifier
- ibm-hobby
- ibm-middleName
- ibm-otherEmail
- ibm-personalTitle
- ibm-primaryEmail
- ibm-regionalLocale
- ibm-timeZone
- Initials
- jobTitle
- localityName
- manager
- mobile
- o
- ou
- pager
- postalAddress
- postalCode
- preferredLanguage
- roomNumber
- secretary
- seeAlso
- sn
- stateOrProvinceName
- street
- telephoneNumber
- uid
Preserving people awareness features in a customized portal
If your portal has customized themes and skins, additional Cascading Style Sheets must be accessed by your theme for proper operation of the People Finder portlet and Person tag.
For more information on customizing themes and skins, see Customizing the portal under See also.
To access the new CSS files, perform the following manual steps for each theme that supports an HTML markup:
- Determine the location where CSS files are linked into the <HEAD> section of the page. For most themes, this will be a version of Head.jsp. The themes provided with WebSphere Portal have a version of this file located at:
yourApplicationServerRootDirectory/installedApps/HostName/wps.ear/wps.war/themes/html/Head.jsp- Edit this file and search for lines similar to the following lines:
<link href='<wps:urlFindInTheme file="Styles.css"/>' rel="styleSheet" type="text/css"><link href='<wps:urlFindInTheme file="HelpStyles.css"/>' rel="styleSheet" type="text/css">- After the two lines in step 2, add the following line and save your changes:
<link href='<wps:urlFindInTheme file="LWP_Styles.css"/>' rel="styleSheet" type="text/css">- Touch the timestamp on the theme's Default.jsp file so it will be re-compiled by the JSP compiler. You can touch the timestamp by editing the file, adding a blank line, and saving it.
- Restart the portal server.
See also
- Plan for collaboration
- Collaborative Services API
- Member Manager
- Working with the Collaboration Center
- Key features
- Customizing the portal
- Collaborative portlets
- Collaboration
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