While at SemTech 2010 I decided I really needed to create a foaf file.  I was disappointed to discover that there was no easy way to export my contact information into the foaf rdf format.  Sure, there is a tool to create a file based upon your twitter connections, but those aren't really necessarily people you have a relationship with.  If I follow Ashton Kutcher, does that mean we know each other?

So, I did what any self respecting geek would do - I stayed up all night watching bad 80's TV on Netflix while writing a web app that generates foaf rdf of all of your Google Contacts.  Sure, it needs polish, but it uses OAuth so any Google user can use it without turning over any sort of credentials.  Nothing is stored locally, the XML goes right into a text box for you to copy, save, and throw on your server.  Give it a try...

Google Contacts to FOAF

Inspired By Technology

Greg Lambert wrote this thought provoking post on the ability to use Lexis for Microsoft Word to retrieve context and related information about the open document. This made me wonder about the prospect of leveraging our internal knowledge about the authors, matters, and clients to provide a client/matter centric view of the documents.

“Refactoring is essential because requirements inevitably change and therefore code inevitably changes to satisfy them. When code which adheres to principles of good design is changed it may no longer adhere to those principles. Refactoring is a technique that allows us to improve the design of the code once we have changed it.”

I like this better than the similar stuff I did for my Conacts Manager poc. I guess I will be integrating it!

Description

We often have the need to display contacts from our CRM system, InterAction, on our intranet. Rather that recreating that contact data, we have leveraged InterAction (which contains both our internal and external contacts) Web Services and the SharePoint OOB XML Web Part for the purpose of sharing our contact information. It is a fairly simple task requiring only a little bit of SharePoint and XSL skills (if you don’t have the xsl skills, don’t worry, I am attaching some XSL at the end of this article). First, we have to assume we have a list or individual person created within InterAction and we can get the user/group ID. Now we access the webservice by going to your InterAction url and appending “/findContacts&folderId=” (for a contact list) or “/findContacts&contactId=” (for an individual contact) and then the ID. You should see something like: Next, we through together some snazzy XSL to make it look pretty (click the image to get the source) Now, we just add the SharePoint XML Web Part to your site, for the XML Link put the Web Service URL and for the XSL Link, point to XSL file above (or you can paste the XSL into the XSL Editor. There you go, it is just that simple.

vCard is a standard format for electronic business cards. Through the use of vCards we are able to allow users to easily share and add InterAction contacts to nearly any address book system. With the combination of a custom HTTP Handler and the InterAction Web Services, we can easily provide vCards to our users First, we create a class to represent a vCard object. Next we create an adapter to convert from the InterAction XML format into our newly created vCard class. Don’t worry, all of the xsl and logic is available in the attached source. Now we override the ToString() method of the vCard class in order to output the card to the standard format. Here’s where it gets complicated. We need to create a custom HTTP Handler to intercept vCard requests. It is as simple as creating a as creating a class that implements IHttpHandler. The custom Handler assumes the file name before the .vcf extension is the user’s InterAction ID and returns the vCard to the browser. Finally, you need to register and configure the HTTP Handler so that all requests with the extension vcf are passed along to our new Handler rather than IIS. Microsoft has excellent instructions for this which can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/46c5ddfy.aspx InterAction to vCard Source Code