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.

But let’s start from the beginning. Everyone familiar with Lotus Notes and Domino knows that the AdminP process is quite an efficient fellow when it is made responsible for the change of user names. I am therefore wondering why someone has decided to run things different in Sametime (7.5.1). Examining the structure of the IM contact lists that are stored for each individual user within the vpuserinfo.nsf database on the Sametime server it is obvious that the AdminP name field maintenance won’t work. While the contact lists itself are stored in Notes documents, the fields contain a custom arbitrary data type that structure appears to be close to the XML format. I therefore understand quite clearly that the AdminP supported maintenance of names can not just be enabled. However, I do fully support the idea jam call to implement the maintenance of Sametime contact lists into the AdminP functionality.

So what needs to be done to have name in instant messaging contact lists changed? As mentioned above the manual itself is a bit misleading.

As a start a name change task needs to be defined. This is done at the Server Administration -> LDAP Directory or Domino Directory (depending on your configuration) -> Name Change Tasks page. The Name Change Tasks lists all scheduled name change tasks and allows the creation of new tasks. New tasks are submitted in creating a comma separated list (CSV-file) and uploading this to the server. This task will be placed in the stnamechange.nsf and will be listed as scheduled in the task list. When creating the csv file it is important to note, that the names have to be full hierarchical and need to be enclosed in quotation marks. The example on page 468 of the Administration Guide unfortunately doesn’t include them.

Example: 
ID
"CN=Christian Petters/OU=Sales/O=Cubetoon","CN=Christian Petters/OU=Marketing/O=Cubetoon","Christian Petters"

Speaking about Lotus Domino and Sametime on Windows, page 464 of the Administration Guide explains that a scheduled task will be executed at the time specified in the Configuration -> Community Services page. Unfortunately the Community Services settings does not include such a parameter and it appears to me that IBM development team did not have enough time to implement this feature while the documentation people already described it.

To finally run the name change tasks stored in the stnamechange.nsf the StBlConversation.exe needs to be run by the Administrator while, and this is important, no one is connected to the Sametime server. The StBlConversation.exe is located at the installation directory of the Sametime server. While it is pretty easy to prevent anyone connection to the Sametime server in terminating the staddin (tell staddin quit) it really appears odd to me that this task requires to be run after hours while it is becoming more and more difficult with these days flexitime arrangements to find a large enough after hours window for all the required maintenance tasks.

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.

Very little to nothing has been changed in the general procedure outlined below:

1. Installation of the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 SDK
2. Installation of Eclipse 3.2.2
3. Installation of the J9 Java Development Tools (JDT) for Eclipse
4. Configuration of the run time environment
5. Configuration of the target platform
6. Creation of the launch configuration

The Sametime 7.5.1 SDK has been linked before on this side. The installation is not different to the installation of the 7.5 SDK and it is not required to remove the previous version as long as the new software development kit will be placed into a different directory.

Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 is based on the Eclipse 3.2.2 Rich Client Platform (RCP). Therefore it is not required to have the 3.2 binaries available any more to overcome the compatibility issues described before. The Eclipse SDK can be downloaded from the Eclipse home page.

Nothing has changed in regards to the J9 JDT plug-in. Whereas the IBM provided link in the book has been discontinued. I am wondering how long my link to the current version might survive.

So far a lot hat has been common between the previous and the new version. The first major difference can be discovered while adding the J9 runtime environment. The three Java archives harmony_regex.jar, nio.jar and sound.jar have been moved to the same directory (jclMax) as the other libraries. The string library, which contained 3 string classes is not part of the packet any more.

The target platform will of course be the program directory of the Sametime Connect Client 7.5.1. Do not forget to add the Eclipse archives

org.eclipse.platform.source.win32,
org.eclipse.platform.source,
org.eclipse.rcp.source.win32 and
org.eclipse.rcp.source

as additional source code locations for the target development environment.

So far the final step would be the creation of the Sametime launch configuration. As far as I am aware nothing needs to be changed in here. So the arguments for the java application launcher in windows would still be

Xint -Xtrace:none -Xgcpolicy:gencon
-Djava.home=C:\st751sdk\client\connect\j9-runtime\win32
-Dcom.ibm.pvc.webcontainer.port=7777

Explaination to the Java launcher options can be found in the Java Development Kit (JDK) documentation.

The information provided in this article are based on the IBM Redbook Extending Sametime 7.5 – Building Plug-ins for Sametime while considering the amendments required to work with the most recent program versions as well as SDK.