Click to Call directly from IBM Connections

Recently we changed our telephony infrastructure to a cloud-based voip offering using softphones on our PC/Mac clients.

IBM Connections is our internal address book and my goal was to integrate a click to call functionality into Connections so that whenever I see a phone number in Connections (profiles, business card) I just can click to dial.

The solution for this was to add a small javascript and some html to the profile configuration which creates a sip url for the phone numbers: 

<attribute showLabel=”true” prependHtml=”&lt;a id=&quot;bria3a&quot; href=&quot;#&quot; onclick=&quot;javascript: var n=document.getElementById(‘bria3a’); n=n.textContent?n.textContent:n.innerText; n=n.split(‘ ‘).join(”); var v=window.open(‘sip:’+n);v.close();return false;&quot; &gt;&lt;strong&gt;” appendHtml=”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;” hideIfEmpty=”true”>telephoneNumber</attribute>
Here I added the functionality to the _telephoneNumber _attribute but you can add it to every phone number.

Now I can simply click on a number to call it and our users really like it:

Special thanks goes to Urs Meli for helping me with the javascript.