Archive for April, 2008

SnTT: Nested Group Display Behaviour in Sametime

Friday, April 4th, 2008

For those of you who are not already noticed, Sametime Connect Client 7.51 or later (and also the embedded version in the Notes 8.0.1 Client), only displays server groups (from the Domino Directory) as a single concatenated level. As a result, any nested groups or sub-groups within it, are automatically ‘expanded’ into their (unique) constitute members and the merged result displayed. This is useful.

Conversely, user defined ‘local’ Sametime groups, are permitted to contain one additional layer of collapsable groups to be displayed. This is also useful.

So, how could these two differing behaviours be beneficially used?

Many organisations make use of nested groups and sub-groups, to create an hierarchical structure for organisational, departmental, or even functional mailing purposes. Often these individual, and sometimes unrelated, sub-groups, contain ‘duplicate’ names, which when added as individual buddy groups in Sametime, results in multiple entries (in different groups) for the same individual. So, by using a higher level nested server group, containing multiple sub-groups, it is possible to have a single collapsable section for all (unique) Sametime users in a particular department etc., or even perhaps, for an entire organisation.

Local Sametime groups can be used to save screen real estate and allow sets of multiple server groups to be brought together into a single collapsable section. This is achieved by simply creating a local Sametime group and adding the necessary multiple server sub-groups or even groups to it.