About people awareness

 

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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 Sametime 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 Lotus Collaborative Services, or both, are configured to work with the portal.

• The online status (Active, Away, Do Not Disturb, Offline) of the person 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 include:

• 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."

• Send E-mail...

  Opens a new message in the user's preferred e-mail client as specified in browser and operating system.

• Add to Sametime List...

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

• Show Person Record

  Appears only if the People Finder portlet is on the current page. This action displays the person's record, 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 we 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 a portal administrator has selected "Include Organization View" when configuring the portlet. This action opens the person's organizational context. The Organization View shows how the person fits into the organizational hierarchy.

For more information about Lotus Sametime (called Lotus Instant Messaging for the 6.5.1 release) product features, see Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing 6.5.1 End User Help, available from the IBM Lotus Documentation site.

 

Online presence

If you have set up a Lotus Sametime server to work with the portal, 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:

• I am active.

• I am away or not using the computer now.

• Do not disturb me.

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; 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 servers that are installed and enabled in the portal environment.

There are alternate methods of configuring awareness and chat features for some collaborative portlets, such as Inline QuickPlace. For more information, see Lotus QuickPlace portlets.

For information on configuration of a collaborative portal, see Integrating Lotus Domino and the Extended Products and Portlets into WebSphere Portal, and when you complete collaborative configuration, pay special attention to Collaborative Services environment properties, 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 Related reference.

• Preserving people awareness features in a customized portal
  If the portal has customized themes and skins, additional Cascading Style Sheets must be accessed by the theme for proper operation of the People Finder portlet and Person tag.

 

Parent Topic

Planning awareness

 

Related reference

Collaborative Services API

 

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