Tuesday, June 23, 2009

A plea for a policy from Lotus

In the past I've posted several "how-to's" on using InstallShieldTuner for Lotus Notes to create custom install packages of the Lotus Notes client for use in either a roll-out or a Smart Upgrade package for an upgrade. With the recent death of the 8.0.x code stream, I decided to bite the bullet and start looking at creating a new package that I could use to test rolling out 8.5 Standard clients. In the past, I had created custom installs for R6, 7 and 8 basic and in those installations, I was able to have some parameters set for the embeded Sametime functionality. My favorite, and the ones that my management liked having set, where that after 5 minutes away from the keyboard, Sametime would set your status as Away and when the mouse is moved, the status retured to Active. The following settings are added to the notes.ini during the install that is created using InstallShieldTuner:
$STActiveToAwayEnabled=1
$STAwayToActiveEnabled=1
$STActiveToAwayTimeout=5
So in looking at creating a new install package for 8.5.0, I couldn't find anything similar to these notes.ini to set that functionality. I can still add those to the install package and they will work as expected if I run the basic install, but in Standard, the settings are ignored. So I opened a PMR asking how to get that setting put in place during install or even with a policy. Well, the email from the helpful Lotus support representative told me that he understands what I'm trying to do, but that functionality is not there.
So Lotus, please hear me, a lowly admin crying out in the night. If it's not too late for 8.5.1, is there some way to either set those Auto-Status change values in the installation or better yet, with a policy?
Stay tuned!

3 comments:

Terry Boyd said...

I may be off the mark here, but can you not roll out notes.ini parameters using a Policy in 8.5?

I know that's what we are considering when rolling out the 8.5 clients to run in "Basic" mode (we have a Policy which adds the "UseBasicNotes=1" parameter to user's notes.ini files).

Andy Donaldson said...

You CAN continue to add notes.ini parameters to the install package. It's just that the ones I want to use to control that Sametime awareness functionality don't work in the Standard version.

Tim E. Brown said...

Check out:

Methods to configure Sametime Connect Client 8 user preferences
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21306943

Something similar might be able to be done in the plugin_customization.ini in the Notes 8.5.x client package you build

HTH,
Tim E. Brown