Integrating Google Reader with IBM Connections Bookmarks

One of IBM Connections features is Bookmarks, where you can save and share bookmarks, in addition to simply sharing a bookmark you can share it with a Community, add it to an Activity, or create a blog post out of it, all from the same bookmarklet.

Nice functionality, but I find a lot of content to share while in Google Reader, so I thought it would be nice to be able to share directly from Google Reader in to IBM Connections.  Google Reader allows you to create your own Send To Actions so you can share beyond the services they already set up for you.  You can find and customize the Send To actions in Google Reader Preferences

at the bottom of the page you will find instructions for creating your own Send To actions

I added a Sent To action for IBM Connections in the Lotus Greenhouse, to configure for your own site just replace ‘greenhouse.lotus.com’ with the URL of your own Connections installation.  There are three fields required to create a Send To action

Name: This is how it will appear in your menu (IBM Connections in my example)

URL: this is the URL to the bookmarklet along with the keywords for URL, Title, etc. Mine looks like this

http://greenhouse.lotus.com/dogear/bookmarklet/post?url=${url}&title=${title}&perma=false&ver= again replace the ‘greenhouse.lotus.com’ with your URL for your Connections environment.

Icon URL: if you want an image to appear next to the Name you can point to an image here, I pointed to the Bookmark Image from greenhouse.

Save your Sent To action and you can now share directly from Google Reader in to IBM Connections

If you use Google Reader on multiple machines the Send To action will appear on any machine you log in to with the same Google ID you created it under.  If you IBM Connections environment is behind a firewall, the Send To action will only work when you have access to Connections.