Carl Tyler's Blog

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Following on from this discussion concerning the Sametime 7.5.1 Office integration, and with Chris's response explaining a little about what to expect, I had some success in getting it to work, and I also installed Outlook to take a look at that integration. Here are my initial impressions.

• Microsoft Smart Tags have a dirty little secret, and the Sametime integration is impacted by that dirty little secret, is that they don't work very well, well the person smart tag which Sametime depends upon doesn't work well. Word figuring out a name, often depends on the context of the words that could make up a name. So for example a list of names at the top of a memo might show some as names, it won't show others, and sadly there is no way of adding a name to be recognized as a Person (or none that I have found)
• The resolving of names through Smart Tags in Word is slow. If I or another user is not logged on when I first enter the name as a Smart Tag, or when I open the document, it will display as (Lotus Sametime) User Offline, as far as I can see, it stays like this until every instance of Word is closed and then opened again (this includes the instance in memory that Outlook uses to render emails)
• If you don't have the preference set in Sametime to Bring chat window to front then any actions you take with the Smart Tag are not seen until you either minimize word or you alt tab back to Sametime. So start a chat, start a call etc. all like they do nothing until you alt-tab or turn that preference back on.
• No way to start a meeting, none of the Smart Tags or Outlook integration provide the capability to start a meeting. So imagine you have an email from your team leader, and you want to start a group chat with everyone in the cc list, or mentioned in the document for example, there is no capability for that.
• Outlook has a toolbar added, It's a dynamic toolbar that shows the awareness for the person who sent you an email. The awareness is only for the person who sent you the email, no awareness for cc etc. and is only available within the inbox, so if you open an email, you can no longer see that persons awareness state. You can drill down through a few menus on the users name with the Smart Tag, but mine always seemed to say "Checking user status" or "user not using" so I couldn't do anything with them.
• Due to the dynamic nature of the toolbar, it flashes a lot. On a snappy machine, I see it flicker noticeably every few seconds.
• There is a "X" cross in the Outlook toolbar, I have no idea what it does. It is always greyed out and has no alt text to give me a clue what it does, and as the documentation for this feature is impossible to find, I have no clue what it is supposed to do.
• If Sametime Connect isn't running when you start Outlook, it will not display name awareness until you restart it.
• The toolbar is called "OutlookAddin", wouldn't it have made more sense to call it Sametime Addin?
• According to the little documentation that exists, to get awareness in Excel/PowerPoint "the name must be for a user who has sent or received correspondence to/from the user in Outlook".