IBM Lotus Notes Domino delivering LinkedIn and TripIt widgets to lasso Cloud services!

07/15/2009 01:13 PM by Chris Toohey

No technology - no matter how amazing - can survive in a vacuum. It takes integration with current technology investments, understanding of the need to integrate with future technology investments, and especially today leveraging Cloud services to make a technology truly valuable to your customers... be they internal or external to your organization.

The move to the Eclipse-based client - for more forward-thinking developers - meant that we could better wire our enterprise applications to interact with other technologies; that we finally had a platform for our product families that would allow us to deliver the usage experience our customers demanded.

And while there are still the occasional obstacle in our path, I'm much happier today as a Lotus Domino developer than I was a few years prior.

With the advent of Widgets and LiveText in the Lotus Notes client, a developer could give a user the content they needed within two mouse clicks versus loading applications and clicking through several different screens. Take this experience to the Cloud, and you have a limitless supply of technology integration points.

Today IBM announced the official LinkedIn and TripIt Widgets for the Lotus Notes Client.

"Notes is the first open collaboration software to be able to provide users with desktop direct access by both LinkedIn and TripIt. This demonstrates the versatility of Lotus Notes in Web collaboration," said Kevin Cavanaugh, VP Messaging and Collaboration, IBM Software. "Whatever Lotus customers need, there's a widget for that."

Not only should you - true believer - get your marketing and sales force the LinkedIn sidebar right now, but you should also consider what in-house applications would benefit from their own Widget/LiveText integration with the Inbox - where your customer spends the majority of their day.

If there is an interest, I'll put together a series of step-by-step DIY Widget/LiveText integration articles showing you how you can get the most out of your Lotus Notes client - just comment to the post and share your thoughts!