Some weeks ago I tried to enable my Lotus Sametime/Domino environment to allow scheduling of Sametime online meetings from within the Lotus Notes calendar. Sounds straightforward. Doesn’t it? So thought I.

While everything was working fine until the processing of the meeting invitation on the Sametime server I started following IBM’s step-by-step guide while double and triple checking that all the settings made had been all right.

After debugging the configuration, again following IBM instructions, it appeared that the Java service manager is having issues parsing the time format of the meeting invitation as shown below.

exception msg:Unparseable date: "01/08/2008 08:30:00 p.m."
01/09/08 9:22:56.117 [Trace ] [ CalendarServiceHandler ] [ com.lotus.sametime.meetingmanagement.meetingservices
.notes.NotesDateTime

Funnily this seems to be caused by the a.m./p.m. time format being used in some English spoken countries as New Zealand, where I currently live and work. Changing the time format to either military time (24 hours) or AM/PM (capital letters) extension let this problem disappear. Some instructions on how to change the time format for the systems account in MS Windows are documented here.

When I submitted this issue as PMR to IBM it appeared that no one else in this world has had this issue before. I can only see two reasons: Either anyone else has proper time formatting and, being German, I consider a 24 hour clock as a proper format or they are not using Sametime at all. Let’s see if I missed anything.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Administration, Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.