Relying on my previous, not always positive, experiences with an upgrade, I did my homework thoroughly now. Prior to the installation, I have read the installation and upgrade guide, I have checked all possible blogs to see if I can experience any glitches with the upgrade itself and for the last time, I have consulted great blog article about various Sametime 8.5 products. Specially as I was to upgrade our Linux system and Domino server prior to that.

I did all that… Only to discover I don’t need it as installation is nowadays a piece of cake. Even on Linux platforms. IBM really did a great job. The one I liked the most was Domino installation. It recognizes that you are running it from console and asks you if you want to install it in console mode. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but It saved me a lot of trouble trying to figure out what the switch to do that was called.

Sametime installation still requires that switch, but it tells you what it is when it cannot install in graphical mode.

So, upgrade took me all 2 and a half hours and even that because I have not moved new clients to the server prior installation. Excellent and painless.

I have asked our users to log off and log on to Sametime, to restart their Notes Client. Heck, I even rebooted Sametime server. Nothing worked. I have scanned Sametime fora and googled for solution, but nothing was found (or perhaps I wasn’t persistent enough). The only thing I found somewhat useful was a link to an XML file that is served by Sametime server when requesting a business card. That XML looked OK.

What eventually was a reason for this, and I am yet to understand a logic behind it, was that the image we have set up to show in business card was too big.  It is a known fact that Sametime cannot handle images larger than about 20k in business cards. We shrunk both images and voila! business cards now work OK.

Thanks to Lars Berntrop-Bos and the news of Domino 8.5.1 I went to download it from IBM partner site. During the download I remembered that the last time I did a Domino upgrade on Linux, our Sametime stopped working as upgrade overridden / deleted some Sametime files and folders. Hence, for the reasons specified in previous upgrade article, I decided to also download newest Sametime 8.5.

In the past, installing Sametime was almost a piece of cake. You installed Domino server, installed Sametime, did some configuration voodoo and you were done. Now, I am presented with 7 or 8 binaries to download. What on earth is System Console Server? Why do I need separate install for 7 other things that were mostly included in one binary in previous release? Why do I need WebSphere Application Server? And I am not even starting on DB2.

Thankfully, uncle Google led me to this blog, where all possible options are described in detail. Now, apparently, to run all new and shiny features, you need at least two servers. Most likely because mixing Domino and Websphere Application Server is not a good idea if not impossible. If you are willing to sacrifice all new and cool meeting and conferencing features, you can keep your one dedicated server and run Sametime 8.5 Classic.

My real question is, what was IBM thinking? I get that separating each and every major feature of Sametime may mean better performance, but I really cannot see smaller companies (up to 150 employees) sacrificing at least one additional server for the sake of running a simple messaging and meeting application. Specially not those (like the one I work at) that already use other meeting and conferencing software. How can I go to my boss and tell him that we need Sametime for meeting and collaboration, when it takes more resources than existing implementation of competitive software? Also, integrating WAS as a framework? Really?

Phew… now with that off my chest, I am off to prepare a plan of upgrading…

What is it?

Don’t change UserId in names.nsf database. OK. So I am not entirely truthful. You can do that, but make sure you add previous UserId to Username field.  But if you don’t, in best case, you can expect angry calls from your users, as e-mails from alternative domains will not be delivered to them. That’s your best case. Worst case is, no one will know and you will lose customers. Lucky for us, we had best case scenario.

I will try to cover configuration and deployment of Cisco Click To Call plug-in for Sametime integrated client. Beware, this plug-in will only work with Cisco telephones and Cisco Call Manager.

Step 1 – Configure Cisco Click to Call plug-in

Cisco Click to Call plug-in is available at Cisco site. Unfortunately it is not free, until you reach certain level of partnership or something like that. For this current post, I’ll assume you have access to the download site.

You only need plug-in for Sametime Client. Server plug-in enables you click to conference, which can connect Sametime to WebEx if I remember correctly.

Extract the plug-in in your directory and go to ciscocfg. Click only executable there (ciscocfg.exe) and select update site which is located at CiscoPCAPWithLotusST_7.1.1.952\UpdateSite directory. A GUI window opens. Fill in required data. Don’t forget about dialing rules, as they may be key to resolving caller identity. Templates for dialing rules can be found at templates directory.

When you are done, go to File->Save All. This will configure your update site.

Step 2 – Create Eclipse Update Site

First, if you already have Eclipse update site on your system, you can skip this step.

The easiest was to create Eclipse Update Site is to use Notes 8.x integrated template. Go to File->Application->New, enter required data, and check Show advanced templates check-box. Be sure you selected your server for template list. Select Eclipse update site and click OK. When processing finishes, you will have your update site.

Step 3 – Create Widget catalog database

Again, if you already have a widget catalog database deployed, you do not need to read this.

For those of you, setting the catalog database for the first time, the process is very similar to creating Eclipse update site described in Step 2. Just pick another template, which is called Widget catalog.

Step 4 – Deploying the plug-in (sort of)

Now that you have your plug-in configured and your update site and widget catalog created, you can proceed with deployment.

What you need to do now is to import your plug-in to your update site database. This is a simple step. Just open your update site database and select Import local update site from view actions. A dialog pops up. All you need to do is to point the location to your site.xml file in the plug-in directory on your hard drive and select OK. If all goes well, you should have an update site imported in about a minute.

If you are only using Sametime Connect clients in your environment, all you need to do now, is go to your Sametime server Administration via web and enter URL of the update site to Sametime update site URL field in your Sametime policy document (can be default policy). All updates located in this update site will be automatically installed to clients at next start up (or about a minute later). Save the document and restart your Sametime server. That’s it, you are done.

Unfortunately, for us, working with environments with integrated Sametime clients, this is only beginning of the road. We took care of Sametime Connect clients and now it is time to do the same for integrated clients. I don’t know what was a reason behind it, but setting an update site just won’t cut it.

Step 5 – Creating a widget from your plug-in

To deploy an update/plug-in for integrated Sametime client, you need to create a widget from your update site. This is specially interesting and fiddly step, as you will have to manually create your own extension.xml file. Widgets, you see, don’t know how to use update sites directly. Extension.xml file is an adapter. BTW, you can name the file as you want, as long as it has correct format. Below is source of my extension file (attributes marked bold are changeable).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<webcontextConfiguration version="1.1">
<palleteItem id="com.cisco.sametime.phone.featurest800" imageUrl=""
providerId="com.ibm.rcp.toolbox.prov.provider.ToolboxProvisioning"
title="Click To Call Sametime plugin"
url="nrpc://myUpdateSiteFQDN/replica/site.xml">
<preferences>
</preferences>
<data>
<installManifest>
<![CDATA[
<install>
<installfeature description="Click To Call Sametime plugin"
id="com.cisco.sametime.phone.featurest800"
name="Cisco Phone Control and Presence with Lotus Sametime 8.0.0"
required="true">
 <requirements>
  <feature id="com.cisco.sametime.phone.featurest800" version="7.1.1.972"/>
 </requirements>
</installfeature>

</install>
]]>

</installManifest>
</data>
</palleteItem>
</webcontextConfiguration>

• PalleteItem id, InstallFeature and Feature id must be the same as ID of a plug-in in update site.
• PalleteItem title, InstallFeature description and name are totally up to you
• Feature version must correspond to the value of the field Version in update site document.
• you should use nrpc (for some odd reason http didn’t work). Link can be obtain by going to actions menu of your update site database and select ShowURLs…

Go to your widget catalog database, create New widget, type in some custom data and import created extension.xml file. Save the document and you should have a widget, ready to deploy.

Tip: don’t forget to specify Widget category. We will go into details later. For now, just trust me.

Step 6 – Auto-install the plug-in

With widget created, it would be nice to auto deploy it. Good news is, that you can do that via Notes policy’s Desktop settings. Bad news is, it doesn’t work for everyone. Not quite sure why, but I have a hunch it has to do with people being logged in when policy was deployed.

The principle of this article is not to teach you how to create a policy. That is pretty straightforward. Let’s just look at your Desktop settings. You have a tab called Widgets. There you specify your server name (this must be a full qualified domain name, despite what help says) and category of widgets you want users to install. And here is the fiddly part. Forget to specify category and plug-in will not be deployed automatically. You can save other defaults or tinker with them, but beware that disallowing people to display My Widgets sidebar will bite you later on with users that didn’t get the plug-in auto installed. Save the setting document, include it in your Policy and deploy it.

Step 7 – Manually install the plug-in

Despite all your best efforts to automate the process, you will still have to do this for some users. Nothing fiddly there. just go to File->Preferences->Widgets, select Show widget toolbar and the my widgets sidebar panel and click OK. My widgets sidebar should now appear on the right. Right click on it and select Catalog->Update. This will force an update of user’s local widget catalog (which is created automatically) and thus trigger plug-in installation.

Step 8 – User input

I am positive that someone at Lotus had a good reason to notify a user about your intention to install the plug-in. However, there are two things wrong with this:

1. It gives a user an option to prevent plug-in to install, even though, the policy demands it.
2. Do not install option is selected by default.

This not only causes you more work (as you at least have to write an installation e-mail), but actually forces a user to think he/she did something he/she shouldn’t do.

When plug-in installs, user will have to reboot Notes client for changes to take effect.

Watch out for…

1. There is no plug-in for Linux environment
2. For some reason, plug-in installs well for Mac clients, but we had a case where suddenly, Lotus would consume all available resources on the machine and demand a hard reboot. Killing processes didn’t help.

Conclusion

In this article, I tried to present you with solution as to installing Cisco Click-to-call plug-in for Lotus Sametime. There are many fiddly steps you need to take, some of them unfortunately unnecessary. However, follow it, and you will successfully deploy Cisco Click-to-call functionality with your Sametime clients.

So we did and it worked. For about two months. Then suddenly we couldn’t connect to Yahoo community. I had to reinstall Sametime Gateway from the start, apply a certificate again and then we got connected. Or to be more precise, the Gateway got connected. None of us could get a connection to any Yahoo contacts and vice-versa. I posted on Sametime fora and checked for response regularly. No response.

Then, few days ago, I came across this Technote. After we applied all steps, we suddenly got Yahoo awareness and yahoo contacts got our awareness back as well.

So, remember. Even though, you have followed Gateway install instructions step by step it will not bring you to a working environment. You need to use the Technote, open additional IP addresses on firewall, install fix-pack and fix Yahoo server list in Sametime Gateway WebSphere plug-in.

The flight was OK, check-in without issues and registration to the conference was prompt, which scared the hell out of me. You know what they say. If everything goes right, something is bound to go terribly wrong.
Conference registration people were kind enough to give me shoulder bag with loads and loads of commercials, a ticket to Blackberry Bold draw and a conference guide, which was probably the most useful item. If you don’t count the bag that is.
Then, off to the city I was for some gift shopping.

Day 1, Nothing new to start with day

So, keynote address was predictable. IBM owns Microsoft was the golden line. Apparently Notes are mostly stalled at the same level, with organic growth to make our world better.

Next, I went to the lecture about best practices of building decent UI’s. It was the same as last year, and the year before. The only really useful stuff was listener’s input about Layer Tree, which you can use to hide each separate layer and thus ease your UI development. It is located under Design->Layer Tree.

The lecture about new enhancements in Lotus Notes 8 was a great session. It’s main focus was on new functions in @Formula, LotusScript and Java. The most interesting new functions are inter-collection operations from DocumentCollection and ViewEntryCollection classes.

Next was a session on composite applications basics. The examples were based on Lotus Notes 8 mail and contacts template, which owned. There was bunch of undocumented features that can make almost any application look like Notes Mail/Contacts, with several drawbacks. Like the one that you cannot alter design of the database after you have made it look like Mail/Contacts. Well, not without changing the design of Mail/Contacts in the process.

Last session was delivered by Chris Miller about installing Sametime 8. Loads of useful stuff which I will try to cover in my future postings. Well at least basics of it. Btw, if you have ST GW and it doesn’t work, even though you can see it connected to Yahoo and Sametime community, it can be that your port number is false. When you get approved, you need to change to 5060 port instead of 5061 which is set by default. You should get notified about this, but it really depends on who did the actual provisioning.

Day 2, Xpages And Composite applications everywhere

First session of the day was about new Domino Designer 8.5. Focus was on Xpages, which don’t work well with Javascript disabled. Other than that, Agents editor is old style. Still. Probably will be better in 8.5.1, but it is not included in beta yet, so I doubt it will see the light prior 8.5.2. The funny thing is, Script libraries use Eclipse editor and it looked awesome.

Next it was Julian Robichaux explaining how to trap errors. Most of it was focused on his open source database called OpenLog, which is quite nice centralized database for storing error reports.

The birds of a feather session about Mobilizing Lotus applications was decent. If your company is supporting Blackberry or Windows Mobile.

Session about WebServices in Domino 7 was pretty exciting. Got some excellent gotcha’s and definitely some more enthusiasm of using web services in future applications. Bill Buchan was great and really made sure that even some dull facts became interesting.

Last session was basically a beginner’s tutorial on Composite applications. Perhaps I will try to sum it up in one of my next postings, as it really opens lots of application usability options. It was an excellent session and it made me even more sure that Composite applications are a great thing in Notes 8.

Day 3, The conference concludes

First session was delivered by Bill Buchan about Advanced OO programming in LotusScript. It was a great way to renew my knowledge of OO development. There was an example of Singleton pattern, which I will do in the future in this blog as well. Also, there was a note of double dot notation which enables you to call a parent class function from overridden function in your own class.

Second session was about management of ACL. It scared me. Specially, since I can distinctly remember that at a certain bank I was auditing their ACL had several Defaults set to Manager. Well most. Rob Axelrod gave a great lecture about reducing database ACL to acceptable level for all types of databases.

Next was Lance Spellman with creating client plugins for Lotus Notes. The session was more or less just a tutorial to build a window in Lotus Notes client. If you are interested in something more, turn to books on creating Eclipse plug-ins. Anyway, it was an essential demo, that showed, how much do you have to do, to actually create a plugin for Notes. Is it useful? Probably, if you have signing certificate. Otherwise your clients will get that nice do not install plug-in warning.

Last session I skipped, even though it sounded much more interesting. However, I had an air plane to catch. So that was it for me. Goodbye Lotus Developer 2008 and Amsterdam.

We installed our Sametime 8 server on Domino 8.0.0 on Linux platform (our very first Domino Linux install) and I must agree, that it is one of our most stable servers. However, as always, there is a catch. Now, that 8.0.2 is out, we finally decided to upgrade our servers. So we also upgraded our smoothly running Sametime server. Unfortunately, it appears that Domino 8.0.2 (despite using update option) removes certain directories used by Sametime, thus making it non-operational. What I had to do is perform an upgrade of Sametime to 8.0.1, that luckily exists. I expect that if I already had installed Sametime 8.0.1 in the past, I would have to perform a re-install for Sametime.