Carl Tyler's Blog

Category Sametime Technote
Sure I could write little tidbits like this, and then set the publish date to Thursday, but what's the point? If I've written it I might as well push them out. Show 'n' Tell is so American too, so along the lines of what comes to mind when I hear Show 'n' Tell, welcome to "Everyday is Doctors and Nurses day", not sure Americans will get the joke, but I know Brits will.

Anyway, today's item to show is the importance of presence, and how companies should really start to think about how they can benefit from it. Presence can be used pretty much in any application, and presence can be more than just the presence state of an individual. You'll hear many terms used to describe what you can have presence for, be it Role Agents, Bots, Queues or whatever, the key thing is you can display presence for more than just a person. So now that we know we can display presence for more than just users, where should we user presence awareness, well obviously anywhere there is a persons name should be made presence aware and in Notes 6.5x and later that is pretty easy to do, but what about other entities, help desk queues? Well the places it make sense to add presence for help desks is where you get many of your current support calls today.

One example, is a customer who recently came to us looking to make help more obvious within the Sametime meeting center. They were finding many people enter a Sametime Meeting, and then have no idea how to share screens, show the whiteboad etc. So the customer wanted to post links to FAQs etc. in a very obvious spot on the page. We came up with an expandable and collapsible section at the bottom of the page that really calls out the fact that help is available (the colours, content etc. here are all customizable and is purely for demonstration purposes). This customer is also someone that uses our Instant Queue Manager product so we extended the example to include a link to their support folks. So here you can see the customized meeting center, with links to some FAQs but also to live help through STlinks. If no agents are available then the click for help graphic automatically disappears.



So think of this and where people need help, and where elsoe does someone need help? Well there's a good chance if someone has pressed F1, they need help, so a really easy place to add live help using the new features in Notes 6.5x and later is in the Notes help system. It's pretty easy to do and takes jsut 5 minutes to setup.

1. First, make sure you have designer rights to the help database. Next open up help database in designer and open the form "Topic1"
2. What I did was just add a table, fitted to margins, with 2 columns, hid the lines, cut and pasted the 'Subject' field into the left column
3. Then I created a new Computed for Display field, of type Names into the right cell called 'HelpAgent', set the property to show name awareness and gave it a formula of the person/queue etc. I wanted to show awareness for.
4. Then I saved the form




So now when someone presses F1 for help in Notes, they see the following:



So if someone is still struggling to understand what the help means, they can click to speak to a real person for assistance.

So think about all the places people need help, get stuck, or are unsure what to do and think about adding presence awareness as another tool to help them focus on their job rather than the tools that they use.

In conclusion, this is a great way to have end users loving the IT department (and a way to make new enemies in the support center). If you haven't yet realised it, this is a great way to help the grey haired folks that think IM is for teenagers to suddenly get it, show them how they can suddenly be chatting with a real person when they're struggling with something and they typically get the aha moment, IM really is more than just chat...

What funky places are you using awareness? Feel free to share?