lekkimworld.com - Sametime category

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.

Re: (y) becomes _

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:36:52 GMT

I think it's a bug in the chat window display since inserting a space after the emoticon once you have written some more text displays the emoticon.

I did a video of the bug but for some reason Youtube wont convert it so please download it here.

(y) becomes _

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 11:26:00 GMT

Am I the only one where typing (y) in the Sametime chat windows doesn't result in the yes-emoticon but an underscore instead? We're seeing this across the office on Notes 8.0.1 Standard.

Update: Now :-D also turn into an underscore instead of a grin-emoticon and apparently it happens in both ends of the conversation. Restarting the chat doesn't solve the problem.