My take on the LotusLive Contacts Sync plug-in and how to install it more easily

I read Chris Tooheys post on the LotusLive contact sync plug-in for Notes 8 (LotusLive Notes Contacts Sync on Lotus Notes 8.5… and why you should care!) with great interest and was very happy to see they didn’t choose to make it a sidebar plug-in. Instead they chose a Tools-action which makes much more sense and which doesn’t take up space in the sidebar. Now it just needs a hook (extension point) into the replication API to sync when I replication with my servers – that would be very nice.

I haven’t really tested the plug-in thoroughly yet but I found it funny that I had to issue a cross certificate to a LotusLive certificate during the install (“CN=www.lotuslive.com/OU=Terms of use at http://www.verisign.com/rpa (c)05/OU=Lotus/O=INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION/L=Phoenix/ST=Arizona/C=US/SerialNumber=DOC:19110616/XX=V1.0, Clause 5.(b)/XX=New York/XX=US”). This is the SSL certificate of the LotusLive.com site. I can actually install without cross-certifying but cannot restart the client until I create the cross-certificate. Maybe Lotus should choose a SSL certificate that is trusted by the Notes client by default.

To make it easier to install I created a LotusLive Contacts Sync widget descriptor which you can use to install the plug-in much more easily than doing the File/Application/Install dance.

To install from this either save the xml-file to your computer and drag it to the MyWidgets sidebar (or use a widget catalog) or drag the link directly to the sidebar.