SnTT: Sametime 7.5.1 - Dual Repositories for User Information

A new feature in Sametime 7.5.1 allows you to pull user information displayed on the Sametime business card from two different sources (see this fix list item). So you can get the user's name and location from, say, a Domino Directory and their job title and photo from another Domino database. We had that exact need so this was a nice feature add for us. Another positive is that this lets you include a photo on the business card without requiring changes to your Domino Directory. Note that this also works if one of your data sources is an LDAP directory; I am not discussing that because we don't have that need but the instructions are documented and are pretty similar.

The instructions in the Sametime Information Center for configuring dual Domino repositories are a little confusing in spots (why talk about Sametime using LDAP for authentication when the topic is using the Domino Directory and a custom database?) but they do work. The instructions do not include a detail tag for a photo but it looks like this: <Detail Id="Photo" FieldName="Photo" Type="image/jpeg" />. If you use GIFs instead of JPEGs, set the type to "image/gif". And the value of the FieldName item needs to be the name of the field containing your photo.

One caveat: make sure you type the XML exactly as shown in the example. We spent way too long troubleshooting problems only to find we had two typos. Whatever the reason, the items in the XML tags must be entered exactly as they appear in the example. We had entered one item name as "DBName" instead of "DbName" and another as "Fieldname" instead of "FieldName". As you might imagine, these were a little hard to pick out after staring at the file for a while. Once we corrected the errors, the data and photo from the second database was included in the Sametime business card.

As far as we can tell, this does NOT require 7.5.1 CF1 to work, although we are running CF1 on the box where this is enabled. And it does work if the secondary database is in a folder accessed via directory link. Thanks go to Grant Bingham for the setup instructions for 7.5 (some of which may be made obsolete by this new function) and to Mikkel Heisterberg for the reverse engineering of the userInfo servlet calls, both of which were helpful as we worked our way through this setup.

Ultimately, since the instructions published by Lotus do work, I guess this just serves as a warning to anyone who attempts this to be very careful in your typing.

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