Terrific find by Mat Newman this morning…
Every now and again one comes across an awesome plugin that demonstrates some fantastic integration between day-to-day applications and IBM’s Connections collaboration platform. This one is a Connections search plugin for Chrome, and it’s awesome.
I’d agree – this is really great. I use the Chrome quick search functionality a lot, so this is a near perfect feature integration (though still some way short of the awesome Connections toolbar for Firefox in terms of overall functionality).
Developed by IBMer Romain Lienard, this plugin seems to have started as a tool for internal use (it supported only IBM’s W3 install of connections initially), but now can be configured for any Connections environment:
This extension let you search content within IBM Connections.
The IBM Connections QuickSearch plugin let you quickly search for users or content within IBM Connections and update your profile picture using your webcam or an existing picture.
Use the popup window in the upper right corner of chrome in order to search within Profiles (with type-ahead feature), Files, Forums and so on.
You can also use it directly from the URL navigation bar, by typing “ic” (without any quotes) following by a space then your query. Then press enter for a global search or arrow keys to reduce the scope.
Download it from the Chrome web store:
I have it configured to search the Greenhouse right now, and it works like a charm. Great work Romain (and nice find Mat!)
Thank you for this article, I’m glad that you found my plugin helpful ! We are not very many to use Chrome and I felt the need to fix the no-connections-toolbar-for-chrome problem by myself.
Regarding the awesome toolbar for Firefox, the thing is that I am *very* limited in terms of plugin infrastructure with the Chrome API, and I really can’t do what I want.
For instance, it’s impossible to create a toolbar in Chrome. Yes, in terms of UI, I can only create a button at the upper-right corner. And this button can only display a small popup if I click on it (I can’t even display the popup by myself, the user have to click on the button first), and the popup will close automatically when it will lose focus. For everything such docked panels, toolbar, etc, I have to deal with HTML & CSS injection, which is a real pain.
So I implemented some other features, such as the notification counter & color indicator, the persistent bookmark search or the profile picture updater, which are not in the Firefox toolbar 🙂
Oh, and the latest version also includes a contextual menu : if you select some text in a page you can fire a search with this text as input.
But it’s still a work in progress, and I’m open to any comments & suggestions 🙂
No, *thank you* for your hard work on this.
I can understand the issues you’ve run into, and I think this is a great first stab at solving them – I’m certainly going to get a lot of value from the plugin as it stands. I’ll send you feedback as and when I have some in terms of what else would be useful.
I’ll also add this plugin to our list of solutions for Connections – I definitely think that many others will get value from it!
Just for information, v2.0 is out 🙂 The plugin should be updated automatically but the extension will be disabled by chrome because it requires new permissions (access to tabs data). This is because of the new feature “share this url”. You’ll have to accept these new permissions by clicking the chrome setting button (which should have turn to orange) and then click on the appropriate submenu (in orange too).
If the chrome auto-update is too slow, you can force the update by enabling developer mode (upper right, in the extensions panel) and click on update all extensions now.
Enjoy 😉
Tested the plugin also against SmartCloud Engage and it works great !
@erik_vos:disqus: Did the profiles part work as well with SmartCloud Engage? Mine fail when searhing profiles or pressing the My profile button.