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Can Bleedyellow save the community $1.2 billion next?

Chris Whisonant  

 I created a chat room...

 

We are pleased to announce the availablity of a Sametime Advanced server here at BleedYellow. The server is located at: http://imadv.bleedyellow.com/. Sametime Advanced brings Persistent Group Chat Rooms, Broadcast Communities, and "Instant Share" to our community. For more information about what Sametime Advanced has to offer, view the About page, the Product page, or the Sametime InfoCenter.

 

Below, we will provide the documentation that you need to get started!

 

Persistent Chat Rooms

Not only are these available through your Sametime Connect Client (see below for plug-in installation notes), but you may use the chat rooms directly from a supported browser:

 

 

As seen above, you may directly enter the chat room, add it to or remove it from your rooms, or view FAQs directly from the browser. There is also a Connect Client interface for Chat Rooms:

 

 

Broadcast Communities

These allow for interaction with people who are subscribers of communities and choose to receive the updates in the Connect Client. Here is the interface from the Connect Client:

 

 

The four icons on the left above the search bar do the following:

  • Broadcast Announcements: real-time alerts can be sent to channel subscribers
  • Skill Tap: subscribers can find and interact with experts; expert responses can be saved and retrieved
  • Broadcast Chat: invite members of a broadcast community to an online group conversation
  • Instant Poll: subscribers can create and respond to real-time polls

The other three icons simply show your status, allow you to join communities, and see a timeline/FAQ.

 

But what good are these communities if you can't see the BleedYellow Communities? Good news there - a daily synchronization task is provided within Sametime Advanced to import all of the Communities!

 

Installing the Plug-in for the Sametime 8.0 Connect Client

 

As of today, there is only a plug-in for the Connect Client. To install this plug-in, perform the following procedure:

  1. In your Connect Client, go to Tools > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins.
  2. Select the option to Search for new features to install and click Next.
  3. Select the option to "Add Remote Location".
  4. In the pop-up window, type in the Name (this can be anything, I used simply: Sametime Advanced) and the URL (this is: http://im.bleedyellow.com/updatesite/site.xml) and click OK.
  5. Click Finish in the Install window (and wait a few seconds).
  6. Place a check in the Sametime Advanced box and click Next.
  7. Select the option to accept the license agreement(s).
  8. Click Finish and then wait a while - you may continue to use your Client while the installation is going, though there will be no visible sign that anything is happening.
  9. You will receive a prompt once the installation has completed to restart your Connect Client.
  10. After restarting the client, you should see the two new Sidebar panels for Broadcast Communities and Chat Rooms.
  11. You will also probably receive a pop-up asking you which communities you would like to add. You will see one with your e-mail address - this is a testing community that only you can access to investigate the features without disturbing others

If you have any questions post them here!

Notes:
  • You will leave the im.bleedyellow.com community in place. This will remain your community. Sametime Advanced is a separate server that talks to the Sametime Standard server.
  • You will need to make the im.bleedyellow.com community the default community for the Connect Client integration to work.

We have awareness!

Chris Whisonant  

If for some reason you can't get into our IM server or perhaps you just want to start a quick chat with a YellowBleeder, you can now login to Profiles and then search for someone. If they are logged into Sametime, you will be able to start a chat with them through STLinks... In Connections 1.0.2, this is the only integration with Sametime, but there will be more to come in Connections 2.0.


A bit of downtime

Chris Whisonant  

On Thursday,  March 20, 2008 at 10:00 PM Eastern Time, we will have a scheduled maintenance window for the Lotus Connections services on BleedYellow.com. This is to resolve some SSO issues - specifically related to presence awareness within Profiles and get full SSO between Connections and Domino. We anticipate much less than 1 hour of downtime.

Apologies for new registrants over the past weekend

Nathan T Freeman  

We had bit of a problem with new registrations over the past 4 days. If you recently registered, and haven't been able to log in, your account should be fully operational now.

Details available here.

New Bleedyellow Auditors team

Nathan T Freeman  

As has probably been visible from a flurry of blogs and discussions, we at Bleedyellow.com want to provide the user community with improved visibility on exactly what's going on behind the scenes.  So in the interest of openness and community cooperation, we decided to put together a team of user auditors who are authorized to inspect the Domino & Sametime configuration settings in the Bleedyellow environment.

We considered just opening it up to EVERYONE, but we don't want to make a rash or risky decision, particularly by throwing around information that doesn't really belong to us.  We thought the prudent thing to do would be to open read access to well-known and trusted members of the community, who have the requisite knowledge to perform inspections and advise us of anything we may have inadvertently left exposed.

The following people have volunteered to be user auditors of the Bleedyellow Domino & Sametime environments...

Bruce Elgort
Carl Tyler
Chris Miller
Gabriella Davis
IBMers
John Head
Mikkel Heisterberg
Mitch Cohen
Paul Mooney
Rob Novak
Warren Elsmore

We've asked a few other well-known administration experts as well, and hopefully will hear from them soon.

All of these people are now in a public group on the Sametime server called "User Auditors."  Hopefully, there is at least one person in that list that each of our users trusts.

As a side note, you'll notice that there's a group called "IBMers."  Yes, this is a public group that you can add to your buddy list.  And it does include all IBM users at the time of this writing.  (It's a manually maintained group for now.)  So technically, anyone from IBM can look at the configuration for the servers as well.

If you're wondering about the Connections environment... well, so are we.  It's not clear what we can do in that environment to allow read-only administrative rights yet.  But watch this blog for further details.

And thanks for keeping Yellow alive!

UPDATE: Rob Novak also just accepted our invitation to the audit team.

UPDATE 2: The last two invitations have been accepted.  Warren Elsmore and Paul Mooney have agreed.  (Well, Warren agreed and volunteered Paul, too.  Based on what Paul did with the ILUG servers, we think we're going to be glad it's READ ONLY access!)

Chats are not being logged

Chris Whisonant  

We are trying to work out a way to prove it to you, but we are not now, nor have we ever, nor will we ever log chats over the im.bleedyellow.com  Sametime server.

Thank you.

Scheduled Maintenance Window

Chris Whisonant  

On Saturday,  March 1, 2008 at 10:00 PM Eastern Time, we will have a scheduled maintenance window for the Lotus Connections services on BleedYellow.com. This is to resolve some SSO issues - specifically related to presence awareness within Profiles. We anticipate less than 1 hour of downtime.