Monday, February 1, 2010

A Lotus Traveler gotcha, if you're a moron like me.

Okay, I admit it.  I pulled another dumb-Dom-Admin move this weekend.  I didn't R.T.F.D.  (That's read the fraking documentation for those that don't know.)  I now submit the following confession in hopes for absolution.
Our story begins two weeks ago at Lotusphere 2010 when I heard the great news that the new 8.5.1.1 patch for Lotus Traveler would allow users to accept meetings on their iPhones/iPod Touch's.  Happy day, I thought.  I had also heard that all that was involved was installing the patch, and magically that functionality would work.  Not sure who or where I heard that from, but at the time it was all I needed to hear.  So over this past weekend, I found 10 minutes to bring the server down and install the patch.  I was all proud of myself when I got into work today and had someone send me a test meeting invitation.  That's when I noticed that the functionality wasn't working.  I was still getting the message "This document is a meeting notice and requires the use of a Lotus Notes or iNotes® client to view the content."  Yes, I had a Monday morning moment of fail.  It wasn't working.  It was at this time that I started using the power of the Interwebs and found the document I of course should have read before hand.  The IBM Lotus Notes Traveler V8.5.1.1 release notes.  Yes, the documentation.
Clearly stated near the bottom of the document is the required steps you need to perform to get the meeting invitation functionality to work:
Meeting attendee invitation actions for Apple devices.

When this feature is enabled, attendees to meetings will now receive meeting notices on their Apple device and the mobile user will be able to accept, tentatively accept, or decline the meeting invitation. Using the Settings application on the Apple device, the user can enable or disable meeting notice alerts by selecting the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings and then changing New Invitation Alerts to On or Off.

To enable this feature: (Note the magic word, enable!)

    * Edit the file \traveler\cfg\NTSConfig.xml.
    * In the section of the file under , add this line:
         
"<PROPERTY NAME="AS_ALLOW_INVITATIONS" VALUE="true"/>
    * Save and close the file.
    * Restart the Lotus Notes Traveler server.


So remember kids, even if you think it's a slam dunk move, take a few minutes and R.T.F.D.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for swallowing your pride and posting this. I am sure it will save others from a similar fate. :-)

Denny Russell said...

Thanks for posting. I've had the download and just haven't taken the time to test this out yet.

I too would not have read the documentation.

Now I need to so I can get this right when I try it out this week.

Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

subtle..

Unknown said...

I think you won't need to do this with Traveler 8.5.2. At least I did no configuration after installing it and I recently accepted an invitation from my iPad. This wasn't a clear install but update from 8.5.1, however I have used the full 8.5.2. installer, which did the update for me.

Unknown said...

Hey Andy, Thanks for posting this! I'm running 8.5.3 and testing TouchDown for Android devices. They weren't able to accept invitations but I added this and now they're working. Thanks again!