Setting up Sametime Business Card Photos
April 2 2010 10:12:02 AM
I finally got SameTime to properly display photos consistently. It's not like I spent a whole lot of time on it before, but the 'Now it's Working!', 'Now it's Not!' was getting a bit annoying. I think I tinkered with it once or twice over the past couple of years when I had some free time, but I couldn't get the photos to show for everyone, much less all the time even on my own machine. This last week I decided it was time to be able to eliminate a custom phone list that did have photos, and migrate all the information to the main address book so that folks could just use their Sametime contacts to get all the business card information.I think it's now working properly, and I've compiled a task list that is a combination of two sources (mainly IBM documentation of course), as well as a couple of little things I picked up elsewhere.
For reference, I've made my notes from: IBM's Technote and a how-to from Grant Bingham who points out a trick (from a Greg Walrath?) to allow customization to the address book template while still getting updates as IBM rolls them out.
Note that you must have Sys Admin rights to the Domino and ST servers.
1. Modify the Domino directory to store photos.
- Open your names.ntf (domino directory template ) in the domino designer.
- Open the Subform $PersonExtensibleSchema. (This is a subform that displays in the 'Other' tab of the person document and is here for modifications.)
- Create a field on this subform. You can call it whatever you like, but I followed along and named it 'UserExtPhoto'.
- Make this field Rich Text.
- Put a label or a comment next to the field so that folks in the future know why it's here.
- On the $PersonExtensibleSchema, design properties, make sure to click 'Prohibit design refresh or replace to modify'. You don't want to have to do this again later.
- Refresh the design of your address book to apply the changes you made to your template.
2. Import your pictures.
- Prepare your photos. They must be thumbnails. There is a max size, I believe around 40k. I set mine at 120px wide and scale to retain proportion. You may be able to adjust to 200px or so wide to eliminate potential whitespace in some cient versions.
- Edit a user's person document, and go to your fancy new field on the 'Other' tab.
- Import a photo into this field. You can use 'create picture', or just paste from your clipboard. This will allow you to view the person in your address book, without having to click on an attachment.
- Save the person document. Repeat for other folks.
- Browse to your STCenter.nsf (http://SametimeServer.domain.com/stcenter.nsf)
- Log in, and click on "Administer the server" link on the far left.
- Click on Configuration -> Business Card Setup.
- Select the "Photo" attribute from the left hand box and click Add.
- At the bottom, in 'Attribute Value' for the photo, type in the field name you used earlier (UserExtPhoto). Note that this value is CASE SENSITIVE, so verify.
- Click Update and get out of there.
- Shut down the SameTime service either via console command, or with your Admin client. You can shut down the whole domino server if you'd like.
- Go to the domino directory on your ST server and edit the file 'UserInfoBCardUpdate.xml'. Check the 'Attributes' line and make sure 'Photo' is last. I don't know why it matters, but I've found it gets out of order and the photo quits working. i.e.
- Start your Sametime Server back up. Log into your SameTime client, and navigate to a user for which you've added a photo. Right click and choose 'Refresh Person Info', and then right click again and choose 'Business Card'.
Troubleshooting
I still occasionally have trouble with the business card information just vanishing, or just not updating even when clicking to Refresh Person Info. You can manually check if the ST server is pulling the current data from the source by using a browser and going to http://your server name.domain/servlet/UserInfoServlet?operation=3&userid=your login id&setid=1
If the information is correct, but your client is still not displaying properly, you can restart the STConfiguration and HTTP tasks on the Sametime server and usually this resolves the issue.
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