OpenNTF is happy to announce and launch the IBM Connections App Dev Contest sponsored by TIMETOACT GROUP which is part of the Appathon sponsored by IBM developerWorks. Contribute your open source project between now and June 23rd and have a chance to win one of five $1000 prizes.




Felix Binsack, Founder and General Manager of TIMETOACT GROUP, said:

"IBM Connections combines many social services into one great platform, where employees collaborate daily with their peers. Its support of OAuth, activity streams, gadgets, widgets and REST make it an excellent platform to integrate any kind of custom and legacy applications.

With the help from you, the developers, IBM Connections will serve information and processes from various systems to the employees right in the context of their daily work(place) and thus make IBM Connections easily the most popular platform in the Intranet. The APIs to build great apps are all available, limitations exist only within your imagination, let's go for it, let's rock IBM Connections!

TIMETOACT is a very proud to sponsor the IBM Connections App Dev Contest and we are proud to be part of such a lively community."


Scope

All types of OpenNTF projects can be nominated that utilize IBM Connections. This includes the following areas:

- iWidgets for IBM Connections
- OpenSocial Gadgets for IBM Connections
- Accessing IBM Connections via the Social Business Toolkit SDK
- Accessing IBM Connections via the Connections REST APIs
- Customization solutions for IBM Connections

Implementation: Participants can choose how to implement their projects. There are no prerequisites to use certain technologies other than that the projects need to leverage IBM Connections. For example applications written in PHP, XPages or other web applications would qualify. All contributions need to work on IBM Connections 4.0 and can use the latest fix packs. You can also leverage other Connections related open source from OpenNTF.

In order to make it as simple as possible for developers to get started with IBM Connections development OpenNTF provides a free shared image instance running in the IBM SmartCloud. This image runs IBM Connections 4.0 CR2, Domino 8.5.3, the latest OpenNTF extension library, 80 test user accounts, single sign on configured and Social Business Toolkit SDK from OpenNTF. Developers who want to use this image should contact Niklas Heidloff (niklas_heidloff at de dot ibm dot com). Watch the video to lean how to use the image and how to get started with IBM Connections app dev.

There is also an IBM Collaboration QuickStart image available in the IBM SmartCloud. You can create your own individual instance of this image (default configuration: $0.48 / hour). This image comes with IBM Connections 4.0 CR2, Domino 8.5.3, 80 test user accounts and single sign on configured. Watch the video to learn how to set up your own image in less than one hour.

IBM Business partners can also request to get access to a downloadable image with IBM Connections 4 installed.

You can also access IBM Connections 4 on Greenhouse if you want to leverage Connections as infrastructure for your custom applications. Note that you need to use basic authentication in this case since Greenhouse doesn't provide a mechanism yet to request OAuth tokens.


Potential Contributions

Here are some ideas what developers could build for the contest:
- Extensions to the Connections search box to search in external sources (e.g. NSFs)
- Community extensions providing moderators the functionality to define lists of documents (custom fields, custom views) on the fly (e.g. task lists)
- Community extensions which integrate files stored in external sources (e.g. NSFs)
- Profile extensions to display publically available information about users in the profiles' tabs (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google searches, etc.)
- Community and home page extensions that integrate custom calendars stored in NSFs
- Add new tabs/pages to home pages and links to custom intranet apps integrated in Connections navigators
- Track and visualize user behavior via event SPIs
- Browser extensions to add easily web pages to Connections
- Reusable code (e.g. XPages, HTML, JSP) to display members of certain communities
- Reusable code (e.g. XPages, HTML, JSP) to access certain files (e.g. in certain communities, certain folders, search criteria)
- Custom workflow apps leveraging the activity stream and embedded experience for approvals
- Custom apps which leverage ideation blog for new ideas and display results in custom apps
- Widget to connect to Alfresco
- Ability to subscribe to Atom/RSS feed and have that show up in activity stream with embedded expreience
- Ability to see my @-mentions/dm's from Twitter in Connections and respond via embedded experience
- Better feeds widget for communities
- Social graph visualizer
- Community widget for Wikipedia search
- Community quote widget
- Get to know widget: Community person of the day - displays a person summary and the user's stream for random people in the community
- Create a presentation from a wiki (community widget looks for pages tagged "Presentation" and compiles all children into a PPT/ODP)
- iCalendar Feed: For anything that has a date/time provide similar to the ActivityStream an iCal feed, so you could surface it in your calendar too
- Timeglider: See the activity stream using a timeglider UI


Awards and Recognition

All prizes will be cash prizes. Winners can decide whether they want to receive Amazon vouchers (US only) or whether they want to get paid via PayPal or check.

The five winners of this contest will receive $1000 each.

OpenNTF will also create videos and screenshots (if not done by contributors), blog about these controls and have them put on an OpenNTF web page as done for the previous contests.


Criteria

We'll use the following criteria when judging the contributions:

1) Reusability, consumability and documentation
2) "Wow" factor and completeness of solution
3) Overall business value
4) Amount of work to build the submission(s)

The judging will be done by OpenNTF again but we invite people from the community to participate in the judging. In that case they obviously cannot participate themselves and cannot judge submissions from colleagues in the same company.


Eligibility

Everyone can participate and submit nominations, with the exception of the OpenNTF Board of Directors. While members of the Board may not personally submit a nomination, other employees of their respective companies may submit. A contribution can be submitted by more than one person but the award would have to be shared between the submitters. Winners should also be aware of any rules that their employer, state or local company has regarding participating in contests and winning prizes.


Prerequisites for valid Submissions

Any open source project may be submitted for consideration for this contest that has been accepted for either the Apache or GPL catalog on OpenNTF. The following points describe in details these prerequisites.

1. Authors need to be approved OpenNTF contributors, e.g. they need to be covered by an ICLA or CCLA (details).
2. Submissions have to be posted under one of the four accepted OpenNTF licences. For example for Apache submissions the Apache license has to be applied correctly (details).
3. Submissions must have been cleared by the ip-manager at openntf dot org so that they can be added to either the Apache or GPL catalog. Contact the IP manager if you need to use third party code.
4. Submissions need at least to provide two or three paragraphs of documentation, some screenshots and in the optimal case a short demo video (all in English).
5. All new project releases are eligible that have been created after the fourth contest ended (12/02/2012). Existing releases can not be nominated but parts of existing projects can be reused and extended.

Submissions

You need to have the code on OpenNTF and send a mail to support at openntf dot org and ip-manager at openntf dot org (for IP clearance).


Schedule

June 23th 2013: Deadline for submissions
One or two weeks later: Announcement of winners


Promotion

OpenNTF would appreciate if you could help us to promote this contest.

Please feel free to use any of the following graphics and link to http://appathon.openntf.org, http://connectionscontest.openntf.org and http://xpagescontest.openntf.org.

Appathon - large
IBM Connections App Dev Contest - wide
IBM Connections App Dev Contest - small
XPages Contest - wide
XPages Contest - small
Two Contests - animated
App Dev Contests - small