Looking Back At 2015

We are fast approaching the end of this year, and I just wanted to thank everyone that has stopped by and read some of my posts. This was my 1st year of maintaining a blog, and what a learning experience it has been.

Initially, I started this blog as a way to share what I had learned on AEM, and I was able to share a lot of information. However, with a career change, and not knowing how popular some of the posts where going to be, I had to start allocating time for comments, and time to improve general design of my blog.

After my career change, I was finding it hard to have time to share content just on AEM. So, I decided to switch gears and have my blog focus on a variety of developer topics, that way I could include any content that I was working on, and share that information with all of you.

Overall, I have enjoyed sharing what I have learned, and I hope you all have enjoyed the content. I look forward to sharing even more content with everyone next year.

I wish you all have a happy new year, and if you have any comments, please share them below!

Ask the Community Experts Session: Deep Dive into AEM and Translations

Adobe will be holding another "Ask the Community Experts Session" on January 19th at 11 A.M. - 12:00 P.M. EST.

This is a follow up on the AEM Gems session AEM 6.1 Translation Integration & Best Practices that can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/1YfAofQ

Join this session for a deep dive into the best practices, and for tips and tricks for using translation within the Experience Manager.

Here is a link to sign up if you are interested: Ask the Community Experts

This session will be hosted by Mathias Siegel and Akshay Madan.

LiveEngage - Connecting To The Engagement History API In Java Tutorial

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to connect to the Engagement History API in Java.

The Engagement History API is a REST API that is offered through LivePerson that allows you to pull your chat transcripts without having to manually go through and export them. In order to connect to the API, you will need to get a set of API keys from LivePerson and install them on your account. Once you have done this, you will need to send an OAuth 1 request to the server in order to access your transcripts.

If you are not familiar with OAuth 1, you can read more about it here: http://oauth.net/core/1.0/

For this tutorial, I am using Eclipse Mars 4.5.0, Scribe 1.3.7, and Maven. However, you should be able to follow along if you are using a different IDE.

In Eclipse, you will need to create a new Maven Project. Once you have done this, open the pom.xml file for your project, and add the following dependency:

<dependency>

<groupId>org.scribe</groupId>

<artifactId>scribe</artifactId>

<version>1.3.7</version>

</dependency>

In order to use Scribe to make an OAuth call, we will need to define a new provider class that will be used by the OAuthService object. If you are not familar with Scribe, you can read more about it here: https://github.com/scribejava/scribejava

Now, in your src/main/java folder, you will want to create a new class called EHAPI.java. This class is going to extend the DefaultApi10a class. Once the class is created, you will need to add the following code to it:

Now that we have our provider, we will need to create a new class that is going to call the API and display the results to the console.

So, in your src/main/java folder, you will need to create a new class called EngagementHistory.java. Once the class is created, you will need to add the following code to it:

Basically, we are using Scribe to create our OAuth service, and once we do this we our using our credentials for the API to create and sign our OAuth request. Once this is done, we send the request and print it to the console. Please see the comments in the code for what each line is doing.

You can download the complete code on GitHub from here: https://github.com/scottwestover/LPEngagementHistoryAPIExamples

Summary: This tutorial showed you how to connect to the Engagement History API in Java by using Scribe. You can build upon this tutorial by adding the option to allow the user to input a date range, convert the response into a transcript file that is in a readable format, or even send the responses to a database.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them below.

Android - Adding A Facebook Share Button

I have gotten a lot of questions about adding a basic share button to your android app from one of my previous posts, so I decided to add a new tutorial that shows just how to add a basic share button.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to add a Facebook Share button to your Android Application.

For this tutorial I was using: Android Studio 1.1.0, and Facebook SDK v4.0.0. You should be able to follow along with other versions of this software.

In order to follow along you will need the following:

• Android Studio. If you do not already have this installed, you can get a copy from here: Android Studio. Just follow the download and install instructions from the website to get started.
• You will need to have an existing project already created in Android Studio that is integrated with the Facebook SDK. If you do not have one, you can follow this tutorial: Android Facebook Integration Tutorial

If you have completed the following steps, we can get started.

1. Open up your Android Studio project, and navigate to your Android Manifest file. Once this is open, you will want to add the following activity:

2. Now, you will have to set up a content provider in your Android Manifest file. You will want to add the following code and replace "{APP_ID}" with your App Id:

3. To actually share your content, we will have to set up a Share Button for your application. To start with, open your "strings.xml" file located here:

4. In this file, add the following: <string name="share">Share</string>

5. Next, we will add the Share button to our "activity_main.xml" file. Open this file and add the following code:

You will want to update the "layout_width" and the "layout_height" with appropriate values for your application.

6. Now that we have the button setup, we will want to update our "MainActivity.java" file to add the button to our app. Once the button is added, we are going to define the content that we would like to share, for this tutorial we are going to share a link. Once the content is created, then we just need setup our button to share that content.

Here is an example of what your "MainActivity.java" file will look like if all you have is the share button:

Now, when you test out your application, you should be able to click the Share Button, login to your Facebook account, and then share the link to your wall.

Summary: This tutorial showed you how to add a Facebook Share Button to your application, and how to share a link.

LiveEngage Best Practice - Multitasking With Hot Keys

One of the main things that I usually hear from agents is that they are always multitasking and that they are looking for ways to be more efficient when they are chatting, so they can provide the best experience possible to the customers that they are chatting with. My response to the client is, “Are you utilizing the hot keys that are available in LiveEngage?”

Hot keys are shortcuts that are available to you in LiveEngage that you can use to easily move between tasks such taking a chat, changing your status, or even viewing the visitor list.

What Are The Hot Keys?

When you are in the LiveEngage workspace, there are seven hot keys that you can use to save you time. You can view a complete list of the hot keys that are currently available to you by opening the hot keys menu. You can view this menu by holding down the ctrl and tilde keys (CTRL + ~).

You will also see the hot keys appear above the menu items that the are related to.

When the menu is displayed, you can either click on the shortcut that you want to use, or you can press the appropriate character key to perform that shortcut. Here is a list of the shortcuts that you can use:

• (L) Logout - Allows you to logout of the agent workspace. 
• (V) Visitor List - Will take you to the visitor list. 
• (S) Status - Will toggle your status between online, busy, and offline. 
• (A) Accept Engagement - Allows you to accept incoming chats. 
• (X) End Engagement - Allows you to end the current engagement. 
• (T) Transfer Engagement - Allows you to transfer the current engagement to another agent. 
• (N) Next Engagement - Allows you to respond to the next engagement. 
• (I) Inactive List - Allows you to view your resolved engagements. 

The end engagement and transfer engagement hot keys are only available during chat. By learning these shortcuts it will allow you to be more efficient and allow you to spend more time focusing on your customers.

This best practice, based on feedback from LiveEngage users, is meant to offer you guidance and to help drive value for your brand.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them below.