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.

Having recently done an upgrade from Sametime 3.1 to Sametime 7.5.1 I have to admit that I am a bit disappointed with the way IBM choose to implemented the maintenance of names for this product. I expected some closer integration into the Lotus Notes/Domino product range. To make things worse the Administration Guide reveals misleading information.

But let’s start from the beginning. (more…)

As of today IBM has made Lotus Notes and Domino 7.0.3 available in English for the download from the Passport Advantage site. Version 7.0.3 now officially supports Microsoft Windows Vista on the client. Further information can be found at the Notes from Lotus Support site.

Update 19/10/07: Important information for all organisations running Sametime 7.5.x on Domino 7 is that the regression that got introduced in Domino 7.0.2 where changes in the JVM are causing crashes of the nHTTP task are fixed in version 7.0.3 of Domino.

I did finally get some time to set-up and try the new Sametime 7.5.1 version with the recently released Sametime 7.5.1 Software Development Kit (SDK).
Since there is no updated IBM Redbook of “Extending Sametime 7.5″ available yet I’d like to outline some of the changes when setting up the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with Eclipse 3.2.2. (more…)

About 2 weeks after the release of Sametime 7.5.1, IBM finally published the Software Development Toolkit for Sametime version 7.5.1 on the developerWorks toolkit page.
The file is dated 27th April but it has not shown up on the download page for the past few days.
While the 7.5 SDK can be used with Sametime 7.5.1 in general, the 7.5.1 software development kit should contain some documentation about the new interfaces and extensions as well as the deprecated classes. Can’t tell what’s in there since I am currently waiting for the download to complete, the trans-pacific connection between the US and New Zealand seems a bit busy currently. Interestingly the size of the 7.5.1 SDK is about 90 MB smaller than the 7.5 one.