Carl Tyler's Blog :: Another Sametime 7.5.1 feature I hadn't noticed during the beta...

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If you login to your Sametime meeting center and schedule a meeting, it will now send you an email with the meeting details. Example:
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Please forward the following information to your meeting participants.

ONLINE MEETING BASICS
Meeting name:	testing to see if an email goes out...
Chair:	Carl Tyler
Start time:	05/10/2007 06:30:00 AM PDT
Duration:	0d 1h 00m
Password:	password

MEETING DESCRIPTION

Here is the meeting description

LINK TO ONLINE MEETING

Participants within the organization can attend using the following link(s):

http://st751.acme.com/stconf.nsf/meeting/7351BEAC0FE81599882572D60049EEBE

If this is your first Sametime meeting, test that your browser is configured for meetings by clicking this link, and then clicking the "Test My Browser" button:

http://st751.acme.com/stconf.nsf/WebTestMeeting?ReadForm

MEETING ATTACHMENTS

No attachments

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This feature is on by default and can be turned off via Sametime Administration. If you're a company that disables mail routing on your sametime server (many of you), you'll want to turn this feature off otherwise you'll get an ever growing mail.box. Here is the E-mail notifications help description for the feature:

If this box is checked, the server enables the sending of an e-mail with the meeting details to the person who created the meeting. A text field is included to add the name of the entity which is sending meeting details; the field should be left blank if the notification is intended to appear as sent from the creator of the meeting. Meeting details include the e-mail address of the meeting creator, the new meeting subject with date and time, and the edited meeting subject with the updated date/time. Details in each meeting notification include: meeting name, chair, start time, duration, and password, telephone information, whether audio and video connectivity are included, how often the meeting repeats, a link to an on-line meeting for internal and external participants. This feature is disabled by default. You can customize the text of the field for e-mail notification. The text is stored in the properties.jar file; a tech note is available for specifics. The password is sent unencrypted unless the password section is removed from the template, so if your company has password-sending restrictions, the meeting creator will need another method of distributing passwords.

The feature isn't as complete as the email notification options for other on-line meeting tools, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Here's how I'd like to see the option improved:

Provide the ability to e-mail the invite to other users who are invited to the meeting.
Include a ics attachment so that it can automatically be added to people's calendars, example google, outlook, mac etc.
Document how admins can modify the template email, so it can be changed easily, so they can add disclaimers, logo etc.

From poking around the email is sent from code in a script library called SendNotificationEmail which is called by the agent SametimeWebQuerySave which is called by the WebQuerySave agent in the webConference form, wll of which are located in the STCONF.NSF. What's interesting is that the help description says if you don't want to send the password around to use other methods for notifying people. Well that's true, but you could still have the email generated without the password by modifying the createBasicsInfo function.

Comments

1 - it's good to see this "feature" in the public product. It's been running in once form or another for years. There is an EMS plugin running around out on the web and the stand-alone ST server version was part of a red book. I know I've written the code a couple of times and improved it more than once from the red book version. It would be interesting to compare how it is now implemented - as part of the core code, as LotusScript in the stconf template, or as an agent ?

Posted by Glen At 10:28:39 AM On 05/09/2007 | - Website - |

2 - oops - missed the last paragraph of your post - i.e. "it's an agent".

Is the agent called directly at the end of the meeting schedule or does it run "on new / update documents" in which case there would be a delay of up to 10 minutes.

Posted by Glen At 10:31:40 AM On 05/09/2007 | - Website - |

3 - @1/@2 yeah I've done this a few times in the past for customers with the features I've suggested as additions, and there are also instructions in the IBM redbook on how to do it.

It's an agent that runs during the WebQuerySave (I believe I haven't checked), but it is immediate, not every 10 minutes etc.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:56:00 AM On 05/09/2007 | - Website - |

4 - It's a script library called SendNotificationEmail which is called by the agent SametimeWebQuerySave which is called by the WebQuerySave agent in the webConference form.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 11:18:57 AM On 05/09/2007 | - Website - |

5 - I'll have to look more closely at this, because the design model was to make this easy for administrators to customize with their own text, disclaimers, etc. It was also supposed to allow you to send to all meeting participants if you specified them when setting up the meeting. But maybe some of this will come with v2 of this feature.

Posted by Adam Gartenberg At 11:55:51 AM On 05/09/2007 | - Website - |

6 - My that is familiar code/feature....

Posted by Tim L At 01:02:18 PM On 05/09/2007 | - Website - |

7 - I am having problems configuring this. The box is checked but there are no e-mail being sent out. SMTP is enabled on the server, but the e-mail notifications are not being sent. I looked in the queue and the is nothing in there. What am I doing wrong. Thanks

Posted by Daniel G At 12:41:22 PM On 09/26/2007 | - Website - |

8 - Not sure who is looking in here here - but although I dutifully 'love' Sametime, it's driving me mad. It's a brand new installation - 7.5.1 CF1 on Domino 7.0.1. It's linked to LDAP on our Active Directory server, and it's beginining to work with the Connect and Notes 8.0 client (though even there it's not perfect - it won't send emails to logged out users for example - use Outlook 2007 and it just calls for a 'privilege escalation' and fails) - however the potentially useful (what we want it for in fact) Sametime Web Meetings system fails every time I try to create a new one with the error:

No RESUME Line: 930 (SametimeWebQuerySave)

The built-in test meeting launches OK.

This is maddening and I can't track down the cause. We are a heavy 'MS' house but my Department wants features that only ST can provide. I can see that when it works we'll have an excellent 'MS-beater' but with problems like this, people are going to start wondering if we have made the right choice!

If anyone out there has any suggestions or can share expertise with us, let me know via email to d.a.clover@open.ac.uk

All the best!

David Clover
IT Manager
Maths and Computing Facuty
The Open University
Miton Keynes
MK7 6AA