Integrating Communicator Awareness with Notes Applications

Okay, some of the recent blogs on this site have been extremely technical and what I would consider “useful, but BORING !!!” So I thought I would spice it up a little and show you an interesting integration function that was demonstrated during my customer visits last week. So for those of you who have tuned out with all the “Directory Synchronization wizardry” posted over the past few weeks, WAKE UP and take a look at this J  …

There is a new method available in Lotuscript to integrate the presence/awareness from Microsoft Communicator inside of a Notes Application. Yes, you heard me right. Take a look at the graphics below if you want proof. You can now configure an awareness object inside of a Notes application that keys off a Notes data field and shows the dynamic presence/awareness of a Communicator user, whether they are in your personal contacts list or not.

All it takes is for a user to install the latest MS Communicator client software and register a “PersonaControls” DLL. Then any Notes application that has these Persona objects configured within them will show active presence/awareness for the specified user(s). Oh, and it gets better. The Persona object has live methods associated with it !!!. So from the presence icon you can right-click and call the user’s computer or start a chat session.

Here’s a snibit of the Lotuscript code that makes this work:

          Set persona = uidoc.GetObject( "Persona Class" )

            If Not (MatchDoc Is Nothing) Then

                        persona.SipUri = MatchDoc.EMailAddress(0)

                        Call uidoc.FieldSetText("UnknownUser", "")

            Else

                        persona.SipUri = ""

                        Call uidoc.FieldSetText("UnknownUser", "User Awareness Unavailable")

            End If

            Call uidoc.RefreshHideFormulas

Gary Devendorf and I showed this at five customer sessions last week and every time there was a hush that fell over the room followed by the sound of “jaws hitting the table.” Then what followed shortly after was a flurry of discussions around how easy it was to transition off SameTime to MS Communicator. Stay tuned for more on that seamless migration process in a future blog. And if you want to see a copy of this demo, or download a sample Notes application with the code, just monitor Gary’s website. It should be posted there in the near future.

-Karl

Example Graphic: Integrated Awareness of ACL Users

Example Graphic: Integrated Awareness of Form Field with Active Methods