Before I became the social software pre-sales techie, I used to be in Lotus Services. As an I/T consultant, my job was to deploy IBM/Lotus solutions to customers, integrate those solutions with existing enterprise applications, and perform any necessary customizations.
As such, I spent numerous days and nights reverse engineering some of our products to determine the best way to integrate with them. In 2007, I took on Lotus Connections while I was still a software consultant.
Of course, every customer wanted to integrate Lotus Connections with their enterprise apps and customize it to their needs. And I think, as a developer, that's when I truly fell in love with Lotus Connections. As a techie, I could NOT believe how simple and easy it was to customize Lotus Connections.
You can pretty much do whatever you want simply through configuration with very little or no coding. In terms of integration, there's nothing easier than with Dogear.
For example, say you have an intranet page dedicated to business development. Wouldn't it be nice to have a dynamic list of relevant links? Of course, it would!! And you ask: "But that's complicated right? Somebody probably has to sit down, read the Connections API documentation, get familiar with REST and Java, and code something in JSP, right ?"
NO! All you have to do is, copy-n-paste. Simply open the Dogear page, do a search for "business development" and click on Add to Site in the bottom of the screen.
Copy-n-paste the generated code into the page where you want to add it and voilá! You are done! That simple! A process that can not take more than 5 minutes. Cool, right?!?! I think so.
It simply can't get any easier than that! As a techie/developer, that's one reason to love Lotus Connections.