Read the New Redbook on Social Portal

IBM recently released a Redbook on “Building and Implementing a Social Portal”  As you know, Redbooks are basically technical guides on a variety of subjects. This one was written by eight different IBM’ers and IBM Business Partners.

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Why is this of interest you might ask?  When IBM released version 8 of Websphere Portal, they solved one thorny problem that has plagued them ever since they released IBM Connections, the two products just didn’t integrate all that well.  Yes, you had Connections portlets but all too soon, they took you from your portal into the Connections UI and you lost a lot of context and of course, the UI completely changed.  There were plenty of workarounds but those involved significant effort.  Version 8 created the concept of a community page that let you fully integrate Connections without having to jump back to the Connections UI.

To help you with the Social Portal aspect, they walk you through what it means, how to install Websphere Portal and IBM Connections correctly, and what it takes to get an existing Connections Community in the portal.

In addition, the Redbook focuses on how IBM Web Content Manager (WCM) can integrate with IBM Connections.  Here’s the Summarization from the Social WCM section:

In this section, we consider two main patterns as summarized below and action a workflow action request:
6.1 Publishing content to from WCM to IBM Connections using Social Media Publisher
In the first pattern, we use the Social Media Publisher to publish short article summaries to Connections, with a link back to the WCM content. This tool can also be used to publish to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn but we do not cover those cases in this document.
6.2 Sending a WCM Workflow Notification to Connections Activity Streams
In the second pattern, we demonstrate how to use a WCM custom workflow action to post an approval notification to nominated content approvers Connections Activity Streams.
6.3 Action a Workflow Action Request via an Embedded Experience Open Social Gadget
In this sub-section, we discuss how to extend publishing workflow notifications to the a user’s activity stream with the use of OpenSocial Gadgets.