I’m happy to share that one of my favorite Enterprise 2.0 tools within IBM is now available on the Internet. IBM Pass It Along is now available on Alphaworks, a public IBM site for people interested in trying out emerging technologies–all you need is a free ibm.com account. IBM Pass It Along is about sharing what you know and learning from other people. If you have a how-to you’d like to share, create a topic for it. If you’re curious about something, request it. If you’re just curious about the crazy tools we use within the enterprise, check it out! =)

Here’s what I love about Pass It Along, and I think you’ll love it too:

• You can find out who’s learning a topic and see what else they’re interested in. Sharing what I know becomes a lot more fun when I can see who’s learning, because it gives me feedback that what I’m sharing is useful. Lists of people are much better than anonymous hit counts because I can view their profiles to see what else they’re interested in.
• You can learn from other people’s contributions. People can add links, related presentations, discussion topics, and other updates. For example, the "How to Make the Most of Your Commute" topic I started within IBM drew lots of interesting suggestions.
• You can create a place for discussions. I give a lot of presentations, and Pass It Along topics are a terrific place to hold follow-up discussions and reach out to more people. I post my presentation material using the Presentation Wizard and include the URL of the Pass It Along topic on my slides. It’s a great way for learners to connect with each other, too.

I also really like how a newbie like me can create value for other people by sharing what I’m learning. =) Whee! I’m copying some of my public content over, and you can find my topics on Pass It Along.

IBM Pass It Along on Alphaworks is a public site open to everyone. Access controls will follow soon, so you can limit topic access to just your organization if needed. IBM Pass It Along is even better inside your organization, where you can link it up with your employee directory or do all sorts of other cool stuff.

Check it out – it might be a great fit for your organization!

IBM Pass It Along

I read in Marketing for Rainmakers (Phil Fragasso, 2008) that part of marketing’s job is to “continually remind the employee why he chose to join XYZ Company in the first place.” page 16 of the introduction:

It’s the marketer’s job to paint a picture of what lies ahead and create a compelling storyline that the employee will want to experience and help write.

Videos like this and initiatives like the smarter planet make me want to help write IBM’s story and the world’s. =)

SCHEDULED: 2010-07-21 Wed 08:00

To paraphrase Edison: I wasn’t failing, I was just figuring out a thousand ways that didn’t work. =)

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Summary of troubleshooting lessons learned for Lotus Notes 8.5.2, Expeditor 6.2, and Eclipse 3.4:

org.eclipse.equinox.common problems when installing Expeditor Make sure you have the version of Eclipse that matches your Expeditor’s system requirements (not a newer version, not an older version). For Expeditor 6.2, you’ll need Eclipse 3.4.

Problem occurred reading your Target. Ensure that your Target Platform’s Location is configured correctly. Set it to c:\notes\framework\rcp\eclipse, or wherever your rcp\eclipse directory is. If you still get the error, tinker around a little or wait a while. I don’t remember what I did to solve this.

Bundle com.ibm.jxesupport not found. Ignore that. You’re supposed to be able to correct that issue by right-clicking on the project, selecting Properties > Client Services, and clicking OK, but no luck. It doesn’t stop the system from moving forward, though.

com.ibm.rcp.platform.personality error or java.lang.SecurityException: Unable to locate a login configuration: *Enable all the features and be patient.

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I’ve been working on getting a Lotus Notes + Eclipse development environment so that I can make a Lotus Notes plugin for my community tools. There’s a lot of interest in the community metrics tool, for starters.

The challenge with setting up development environments is getting all the versions to line up with the tutorials on the Net. I came across a page that described how to set up Lotus Notes 8.5.1 with the Eclipse Plugin Development Environment (PDE). I was on a newer version of Eclipse, so I needed to figure out a couple of the steps, and I eventually ran into a security exception with login configurations.

Along the way, I came across Lotus Expeditor and decided I wanted to try that. I saw an old article that said Expeditor only works with Eclipse 3.2.2 and not the newer versions, so I installed that, but it had problems trying to find com.ibm.equinox.common. Then I found out that I had a newer version of Expeditor which requires Eclipse 4.0. When I installed that, Expeditor installed fine.

Lesson learned: Look up the version of the toolkit you’re using. Look up the specific software requirements for that version. Match it instead of using newer versions.

Hmm. New error: Problem occurred reading your Target. Ensure that your Target Platform’s Location is configured correctly. I have it set to c:\notes\framework\rcp\eclipse. It won’t accept c:\notes\framework\eclipse . Hmm. It works now. I don’t know what I did, though.

I’m running into the com.ibm.rcp.platform.personality error again. Let’s try reloading those. They show up in the plugin list for the run configuration, though. Ah. Selecting another plugin that depends on that plugin might’ve done the trick.

There’s a note about Bundle com.ibm.jxesupport not found. com.ibm.jxesupport was removed in Lotus Expeditor 6.2.0. You’re supposed to be able to correct that issue by right-clicking on the project, selecting Properties > Client Services, and clicking OK, but no luck. It doesn’t stop the system from moving forward, though.

… and we’re back at the java.lang.SecurityException: Unable to locate a login configuration which I encountered this morning.

Okay. What do I know about this error?

• Maybe I’ve configured the wrong JVM.
• Maybe the JVM can’t find lib/security/java.security .
• Maybe there isn’t one by default in Notes, so I have to create it.
• Maybe the classes aren’t in the classpath.

Aha! Found someone with the same error message, but in a different language. The person reported that checking all the boxes in the plugin tab helped. Let’s try running it with all the features enabled (oh my). Lots of warnings, but still going… And there’s the Lotus Notes login dialog, and the sample QuickNote plugin. I think we have it!

Useful links:

• Getting started with the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit 6.2.1
• Lotus Expeditor wiki
• Configure Eclipse 3.5 for Notes 8.5.2

Jennifer Okimoto spoke about social business at yesterday’s Canadian Women in Communications (CWC, @cwcafc) meetup in Toronto. Since she’s a friend, former colleague, and all-around awesome person, I just had to catch up with her while she was in town. I was amused to turn up in a couple of her stories. =) Here are my notes from her talk. Click on the image for a larger version.

Feel free to share this! (Creative Commons Attribution License) Like these? Check out my other sketches for more. You can find out more about Jennifer Okimoto on Twitter (@jenokimoto) or LinkedIn.

For your convenience and ease of sharing, you can find this page at http://sach.ac/socbizjen .

Sketchnoter’s notes: I did these sketchnotes on paper because I didn’t have my tablet PC with me. I used a black Pilot V5 Hi-Tecpoint on a legal-sized sheet of paper. It turned out that my flatbed scanner can’t handle legal-sized sheets of paper and my margins were too small for the sheet-fed scanner, so I cut it in half (hooray for plenty of whitespace!), scanned the pieces, overlaid them in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, erased the overlap, and desaturated the layer to get rid of the slight greenish cast. I added the blue colour by drawing a separate layer in “Add” mode. Since I drew in ink, I decided to leave the contrast as varying instead of redrawing everything digitally. Drawing on paper makes me miss working digitally (those nice, clean, confident lines!). <laugh> Next time!