A sneak peek at LinkedIn integration into Lotus Notes

The Profiles component of Lotus Connections is a great way of finding expertise and information about people within your organisation. This has been greatly enhanced through the tight integration into Lotus Notes 8.5. So whenever I see a name in a Notes document "Live Text" recognises that it is a name and allows me to search Profiles for that user. This is great for finding out about people internally but there is also a need to be able to find information about people who are external to your organisation. So Lotus announced at Lotusphere that they are working with LinkedIn to produce similar integration and I have just installed it to see how well it works. And the answer is brilliantly. When I select a message in my inbox;

It automatically enters that name into the LinkedIn sidebar application and returns a search matching the name (I had to manually edit the "J" our of my name since it does not appear in my LinkedIn profile).


Clicking on my name in the search results brings up my profile in the sidebar. So if I receive an email from a partner or customer it is that easy to find their LinkedIn profile and understand. There is still a little bit or work to do on the installer (you can't just drag it into your widgets sidebar yet) and I'm not sure if it will be released as a standalone plugin or as part of maintenance release but it is going to be well worth the wait.

Comments

Ed said…
Great Stuff! Does this require Connections or just the ND8.x client?
Tue Mar 10, 12:13:00 am GMT
Mr Ports said…
Hi Ed. In this case I am just using Notes 8.5. The Lotus Connections integration is separate.
Tue Mar 10, 12:18:00 am GMT
Unknown said…
Is this integration a widget and is it publicly available?
Tue Mar 10, 01:15:00 pm GMT
Mr Ports said…
@telvox Yes it is a widget. Not yet public and I'm not sure when it will be released.
Tue Mar 10, 04:50:00 pm GMT
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