lekkimworld.comSametime

Sametime 8.5

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:30:32 GMT

Lotus Sametime 8.5 Beta for the new meeting rooms have been added to greenhouse.lotus.com and it looks great.

"Sametime 8.5 Meetings are an entirely new way to collaborate with others online. Sametime Meetings are incredibly easy to use. Fully integrated into the Connect client you already use for chat, they make it simple to join a meeting with a single click; invite others by dragging their names from the contact list; upload materials via drag and drop; even share your screen from the Macintosh operating system. Of course, not everyone can participate via a Sametime Connect client, so 8.5 includes a zero-download, firewall friendly browser client as well.

Sametime Meetings are also different. Meeting rooms are reservationless and don't require scheduling. They can be instantly created and linked to calendar invitations from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. Sametime Meeting Rooms can be persistent. You can use the same room over and over for regular meetings and keep frequently used materials on hand during the course of the project.

Learn more about it by going here. Stay tuned for more Sametime capabilities to be available on Lotus Greenhouse soon."

A serious blow for AppDev on Notes - the proof of entitlement for Lotus Sametime is seriously screwed up!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:01:30 GMT

As you probably know you are entitled to a Lotus Sametime Entry license when you have a "Lotus Notes for Collaboration" license. This is really great and a real selling point for Notes since Sametime is a "first class citizen" in the Notes 8.x client as it provides you with awareness throughout the client and in custom applications including sidebar plug-ins. It also allows for awareness in web pages using either Sametime Links (stlinks) or the newer and much better Sametime webapi (as used in Lotus Connections 2.x).

So now comes the problem - have you ever read the PoE or Proff of Entitlement for Lotus Sametime as it pertains to the Lotus Notes for Collaboration license? Probably not. Read below and weep!! (or read the full document - the text for "IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration" is on page 2 of that document)

"A valid POE for the IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration does not include the right to: 1. ... (omitted for brevity)
2. ... (omitted for brevity)
3. Enable or use IBM Lotus Sametime Limited capabilities beyond the default settings in the Program as provided to You, or as established by policy within IBM Lotus Sametime server, including without limitation: Lotus Sametime Connect client, IBM Lotus Sametime Web conferencing capabilities, access from a mobile device, use of IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway, voice chat, video chat, file transfer, geographic location awareness, IBM Lotus Sametime toolkits or APIs, or plug-ins and applications built using the IBM Lotus Sametime unique APIs available in the IBM Lotus Sametime toolkits, with the exception of the chat logging service provider interface.
A POE for IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration includes all rights granted hereunder for IBM Lotus iNotes for Collaboration."

So this is lawyer speak and quite convoluted but in essence it says that a Lotus Notes for Collaboration licensed user may

use Sametime for chat and awareness using the default settings on the server (meaning no custom business card or photo)
not use file transfer
not use any Lotus Sametime API besides the chat logging API

The first two are IMO hopeless restrictions but the last one is really, really, really, really bad! It's beyond words actually. It means that you as a developer must require that a user has a Sametime Standard license in order to use Sametime awareness in your own applications. To be fair it could be that this is only the case for sidebar applications and SWT based composite application components and doesn't pertain to forms/views (though you could argue that they use an API as well). Another thing that this entails is that you may not use Sametime awareness in Lotus Connections as it uses a API to do the awareness (Sametime webapi). I just checked the PoE for Lotus Connections and no further Sametime entitlement is extended there.

So what does this mean for me as an application developer? Well it means that the sidebar applications I'm developing have to distinguish between Sametime users and make sure that Sametime functionality is only exposed to Sametime Standard license holders. How do I do that? Not sure as I don't know of an API which tells me which Sametime license the current user has. Oh - and it has to be a Notes API as I otherwise technically violate the license agreement on behalf of the user.

Who came up with this? What sense does it make to provide less functionality in API than in the UI? I really don't get it. If I had anything to say at all the restriction on API's in the client should be lifted. It is these API's that makes the platform strong and feel coherent since applications running on the platform can leverage the platform.

So from being really psyched about the appdev perspective in Notes as it pertains to Sametime and how Sametime could be used throughout the client I'm now really bummed out. From a customer standpoint it's going to be difficult to tell them that many of the demos that IBM do require a Sametime Standard license. And then we have our own applications where we have to informing and making sure they understand what they may use based on the license they hold.

Sigh....

(As always I could be wrong about this but I have just been through IBM Lotus here in Denmark which says I have understood the PoE correctly so I'm probably right.)

Sametime business card data cache

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:38:40 GMT

The Sametime client has a cache of the information it has fetched from the business card (aka blackbox) system on a per user basis. This is both the textual data and the image data. In case your Sametime client displays stale data you can do one of two things:

Right-click the contact and select "Refresh Person Info". This will make Sametime refetch the data from the Sametime server.
Clear the cache from disk.

In some cases option 1 wont work although it's far far the easiest. I have seen this when changing the person image format (e.g. from jpg til gif). In this case you may need to clear the cache from disk.

So where is this cache? Well if you open the "workspace\.metadata\.plugins\com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.people.impl\PersonCache" directory beneath your Notes data directory you'll see a directory per Sametime community you're connected to. In each of these directories you'll find

an .index file containing a list of the known users
an XML file per user with person info
a picture, if any, of the user

If you want to purge the cache for a community you can close the Notes client, clear the contents of the .index file (you may be able to delete the file altogether but I haven't tried) and delete the xml and image files. When you restart Notes and hover over a Sametime contact the client will refetch the business card data.

Easy.

Sametime blackboxes and CommonField tag - keep your eyes open!

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:41:42 GMT

I have written quite a couple of posts about Sametime blackboxes over time on how to write your own and how to configure multiple blackboxes to fetch business card data from multiple sources. I wrote some articles in THE VIEW on the matter and I wrote the backbox used on the Bleedyellow site to fetch business card from Lotus Connections.

One of the critical pieces in the Sametime blackbox puzzle is the <CommonField CommonFieldName="fieldname"/> tag from the userinfoconfig.xml (the file used to configure the blackbox system). This tag is used to indicate to the blackbox subsystem which field from the primary blackbox should be used to identify the user being queried in subsequent blackboxes. Unfortunately I have seen over the last couple of implementations I have done that this tag cannot be relied upon anymore.

In the last two implementations I have done I'm seeing that the UID from the context being sent to the secondary (and tertiary) blackbox is the distinguished name (i.e. the LDAP DN or Notes DN) rather than the e-mail address is specified in userinfoconfig.xml. These implementations are primarily based on Domino 8.0.2 and Sametime 8.0.1. In these implementations I have had to write code to "re-lookup" the e-mail address in LDAP based on the DN.

I'm trying to get IBM to react to this fact but no luck so far. I'll keep you posted...

Sametime Web API disabled by default

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:47:00 GMT

Apparently the Sametime Web API is disabled by default (at least as of Notes 8.5 beta 2). This is important since Lotus Connections and other newer wen products from Lotus use the Sametime Web API in the Sametime Connect client / Sametime embedded in Notes for awareness. For more info see this post).

To enable the Sametime Web API do as follows:

Close Notes
Find your plugin_customization.ini File (in <Notes binary directory>/framework/rcp)
Open the file in an editor and toggle the value of "com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.webapi/startWebContainer" from false to true (of the line is not there simply add it)
Save, close and start Notes

Sametime Awareness Simulator finally available for download

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:33:23 GMT

The Sametime Awareness Simulator is sponsored and brought to you by IntraVision the maker of OnTime Group Calendar, the leading provider of group calendar and meeting room booking and managing software for the Lotus Notes platform. Read more at ontimesuite.com.

Announcement
I'm happy to announce that the Sametime Awareness Simulator is finally available for general download from the applications main page (lekkimworld.com/sas). More information such as installation instructions, how-to-use information etc. can be found at that page too.

Comments more than welcome.

Part 2 of the blackbox article published

Thu, 22 May 2008 10:34:13 GMT

The second and final article in my series on Sametime blackboxes (Configuring the Sametime business card system, Part 2: Reach more data with custom blackboxes) has been published at the THE VIEW website and will be out in the May/June issue.

Where as the first article primarily focused on configuration and setup of the blackbox system the second article describes how to develop your own custom blackbox implementations. One of the blackboxes I describe is the one I developed for the bleedyellow.com Sametime server. This implementation retrieves business card data from Lotus Connections.

Sametime screencapture tool

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:12:00 GMT

Although I have previously been having problems with the screencapture tool in Sametime I still use it a lot. Today I was surprised to discover that it uses the clipboard to transfer data between the screencapture component and the text input box. The clipboard is also used when sending the captured data directly to the chat partner. The fact that any unsent message in the text area is lot when doing that is a topic for another post.

Using the clipboard is fine by then why isn't the contents of the clipboard restored after submitting? What if I had some important stuff on the clipboard I was using? Hmm... To me this isn't a nice user experience.

P.S.: I'm running Sametime 8 in Notes 8.0.1.