Despite Lotus Connections being a great option for organisations looking to deploy a social software platform, it does not include any wiki functionality. This is going to be remedied in a Summer release, but for organisations looking to get started now it remains a significant functionality gap. To compensate, IBM have worked with Atlassian Confluence and Socialtext to integrate those wikis into Connections.

At Headshift, we’ve been looking at how this integration works, and how organisations can use Confluence and Socialtext within Connections. The screenshots below use Confluence, although it works very similarly with Socialtext.

Once the integration is set up (no easy task, you may need some help!), you are given the option of creating an associated wiki when you create a community, shown below.

Once the Community is created, two new areas are added to the Community. A link to the wiki space itself and the feed from the wiki. This wiki has been created for us automatically by Confluence.

If we click on the “Confluence Wiki” link, we are taken directly to our new wiki in Confluence and can add some content.

We now see that content in the Community.

So far, so good, but we’ve also found some limitations.

• Both the wiki and Lotus Connections must use the same LDAP.
• You can only create a new wiki, you cannot use an existing wiki. A workaround could be to create your Community and move content from an existing wiki into your new one, but that is far from ideal.
• When you click on the “Confluence Wiki” link, it takes you directly into the Confluence UI, leaving Connections behind. The only way back is the back button – it may not be obvious for novice users how to return to Connections.
• There is no single sign-on. Even though the two systems use the same LDAP, if you click on “Confluence Wiki” you need to sign in before you can edit any content.

There is a more serious issue in how content is presented in the Community, especially once you get to a certain level of complexity.

Here is a screenshot of a basic structure of our wiki in the Enterprise 2.0 community

You can see that there are three children. However, when shown in Connections they appear at the same level as the Home page. Connections shows a list of all pages, and doesn’t show page hierarchy.

Further the links highlighted above do not resolve correctly. They refer to the Connections server, not the Confluence server.

It gets worse when you add images / attachments…

Translates to:

So, our recommendation is that to display simple wiki content, this approach works, but once you go beyond the basics there are some limitations. We’d be more than happy to take a look at your Confluence and Lotus Connections environments, and help plan the best approach for you – so get in touch if we can help.