Testing Sametime 7.5
by Volker Weber
Here are a few things to test with the Sametime 7.5 client.
First of all, if you have a Terminal Server or Citrix test environment, please test the client in this environment. It will be very interesting to see how well-behaved the client is, especially in terms of memory utilisation. Next year's Notes release will be built on the same technology and you can get some firsthand experience. Will a multiuser environment on Windows be able to host clients built on this framework?
Second, how can you manage plugins? I have heard many incidents that plugins have had serious effect on the stability of the Sametime client. Deploying plugins is actually very easy: You just throw them into the ./plugins directory of the Sametime client. It will be available the next time you restart the client. You can also have the server deploy plugins into this directory if you have set up provisioning. As the Sametime client runs as a user process, it needs to be able to write to this directory within the "program files" tree in Windows. Can you lock down this directory while still being able to deploy plugins, and if so, can you prevent the user from installing rogue plugins?
Comments
Don't know about the first point, but I'd be very interested to see the results when somebody tries it out.
As for the plug-in security - this was covered by Paul Mooney in his blog a while back.
Thanks, Matt. Now it will be interesting to see if it actually works as predicted.
Is there a list of available plug-ins somewhere?
@Andy, from looking at the client configuration, you should be able to point to a site.xml file on a Sametime server to get plugins. I haven't installed a server yet, so I'm not sure where the plugins would be stored by default.
Anyone know if the real time spell check is less agressive at spotting spelling errors yet?
It seems crazy, that it starts flagging words as mispelt before you have finished typing them. Of course the word is misspelt, if you haven't finished typing it! It should flage errors after you press the space bar.
@Chris, Yes, I see there is a way to provision plug-ins from the server. What I meant was is there a source of plug-ins you can add to Sametime post install? public-domain, freeware, buy etc. Does it come bundled with any plug-ins as standard?
Andy, I don't know if this list exists and where it is hosted, but everything is a plugin in Eclipse. The buddylist, the chat windows, everything.
Since the official release hasn't come yet, details on plug-ins and how/where to find them are still forthcoming...
@Andy, I believe IBM is planning a plugin repository along the lines of the Webpshere Portal repository.
