This bug had me scratching my head for a few hours yesterday
Category Sametime Telephony
As some of you probably know, Epilio do quite a bit of telephony and video integration for vendors in the Sametime space, plus a lot of other Sametime stuff obviously. Yesterday we were faced with an interesting problem with one of our customers and the integration we've been building for them. So here's the problem we were seeing.
Users with Sametime 8.5 installed, were happily taking part in Conferences with telephony integration and click-to-call conferencing. One of the users then got a new machine and installed the Sametime 8.5 client. They entered their telephone conferencing details, passcode, etc. in the preferneces and would click to make a call. Whenever they clicked to make a call a dialog would appear saying "You need to fill out all required call information before you can place a call. Would you like to do so now?" with the options yes or no. The user would select Yes, and every detail in the page displayed was already completed. The same user would login on his old machine and there would be no problem. Reboots of the server and the client made no difference, and server logs revealed nothing.
Eventually I worked out that it was the Conferencemanager.properties file on the server. The conferencemanager.properties file allows telephony providers to customize the options that are shown to users in the Sametime telephony preferences panel (although there are some bugs with this in Sametime 8.5 that didn't exist in earlier versions). Modifying the properties file options allows options to be removed, so for this customer we had the clientId option hidden, which is done with a setting like this:
#
# Client ID field
#
ClientIdEnabled=false
ClientIdRequired=true
ClientIdMutable=false
So the bug it turns out, is the Required option, if that is set to true, then even if the field is hidden, the code in Sametime still expects it to be there when you come to make the call, although the code in the preferences panel, is smart enough not to require it if the field isn't shown and doesn't mention a problem when you save the settings. Changing the ClientIdRequired=true to false and restarting the media server solved the issue.
So why did it work on older installs and not new ones? Well in the past we used the clientID field and later on it was hidden, but somewhere in the Sametime client it still had that value, so as far as Sametime was concerned the required field was there. Anyway, a stupid bug that cost me a few hours. Also whilst I'm here, I wish the Sametime folks had kept the users call login details in the vpuserinfo.nsf, it made it much easier when you logged onto a different machine.
As some of you probably know, Epilio do quite a bit of telephony and video integration for vendors in the Sametime space, plus a lot of other Sametime stuff obviously. Yesterday we were faced with an interesting problem with one of our customers and the integration we've been building for them. So here's the problem we were seeing.
Users with Sametime 8.5 installed, were happily taking part in Conferences with telephony integration and click-to-call conferencing. One of the users then got a new machine and installed the Sametime 8.5 client. They entered their telephone conferencing details, passcode, etc. in the preferneces and would click to make a call. Whenever they clicked to make a call a dialog would appear saying "You need to fill out all required call information before you can place a call. Would you like to do so now?" with the options yes or no. The user would select Yes, and every detail in the page displayed was already completed. The same user would login on his old machine and there would be no problem. Reboots of the server and the client made no difference, and server logs revealed nothing.
Eventually I worked out that it was the Conferencemanager.properties file on the server. The conferencemanager.properties file allows telephony providers to customize the options that are shown to users in the Sametime telephony preferences panel (although there are some bugs with this in Sametime 8.5 that didn't exist in earlier versions). Modifying the properties file options allows options to be removed, so for this customer we had the clientId option hidden, which is done with a setting like this:
#
# Client ID field
#
ClientIdEnabled=false
ClientIdRequired=true
ClientIdMutable=false
So the bug it turns out, is the Required option, if that is set to true, then even if the field is hidden, the code in Sametime still expects it to be there when you come to make the call, although the code in the preferences panel, is smart enough not to require it if the field isn't shown and doesn't mention a problem when you save the settings. Changing the ClientIdRequired=true to false and restarting the media server solved the issue.
So why did it work on older installs and not new ones? Well in the past we used the clientID field and later on it was hidden, but somewhere in the Sametime client it still had that value, so as far as Sametime was concerned the required field was there. Anyway, a stupid bug that cost me a few hours. Also whilst I'm here, I wish the Sametime folks had kept the users call login details in the vpuserinfo.nsf, it made it much easier when you logged onto a different machine.
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