Archive for the ‘Sametime’ Category

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.

SnTT: Preventing Sametime Users from Accessing Hidden Groups

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

This SnTT is a Sametime related follow-up to an excellent SnTT posting a short while back, by Paul Mooney, entitled Preventing users from mailing specific groups.

It’s a great tip. However if you share your Domino Directory (and its hidden groups) with your Sametime Server, then I recently discovered a potentially nasty caveat in using this technique, which I think is important to share, particularly if the members of these groups are private and confidential, such as for example, client email addresses.

Basically, whilst these groups are effectively protected by Readers Names fields which prevents (unspecified) Notes users viewing or accessing them. Sametime totally disregards this and as a result, allows not only the names of these hidden groups to be browsed, but perhaps more importantly, for their members names to be easily viewed.

Without changing the method of providing this hidden group functionality, or perhaps even changing the design of the Domino Directory, the only workaround is to use a selective replication formula on your Sametime Servers’ Domino Directory, in order to prevent these specific documents from replicating across.

For example:

SELECT !(@UpperCase(ListName)=”HIDDEN_GROUP_NAME” & Form =”Group”)

If anyone has any alternative ways of dealing with this issue, then I’d love to hear them . . .