They say “Ask and ye shall receive”, and that’s exactly what has happened to me this week. I was at the Cloud Social Redbooks residency last week and spotted one of the IBM’ers had a rather nifty IBM Connections toolbar for Firefox installed. A few tweets later and @david_hay connected to the author of the toolbar. Today I am very pleased to say that the toolbar has now been released for the general public, and rather cool it is too. So thanks to a bit of social media and a willing helper (thanks Dave!), we now have yet another great reason to use IBM Connections.

You can get the Connections Toolbar for Firefox from IBM Greenhouse. Download the .xpi file and then in Firefox choose, Tools, Extensions and click on Add from File. Choose the downloaded .xpi file. The toolbar will then appear together with a congratulatory page from the developerWorks wiki:

The next step is to choose Tools, IBM Connections Toolbar from the menu bar in Firefox:

Choose Configure and enter the URL of your Connections server, together with your credentials.  Remember to add /search to the end of the URL in the box.

When you hit close the toolbar will start searching your Connections server and after a short period the greyed-out buttons will enable.

The result is an instantly-accessible set of tools for finding what’s new in your Connections world, as per below:

It works with Connections 3.0 to 4.0, private installations and Greenhouse and I thoroughly recommend it to any and every Connections user.