So I upgraded our production Sametime server from 7.0 to 8.0
this past weekend. It went amazingly
smooth. Our 800 Sametime users use a
variety of methods to access the IM.
75% use either DWA or Portal IM portlets to access. The other 25% use either a Notes 7 (soon to
be 8) client, or Sametime for Blackberry.
So I had many different clients to consider during the upgrade. I also had Quickr integration to deal with.
Here are the key lessons I learned. Maybe others can benefit from them:
- Don’t rely soley on your own PC for testing. As an administrator, you probably don’t have
a standard configuration. In my case I
had a version of Java (1.0.6.2) that would not show awareness status in
webmail. Other users were active and
were able to confirm it was working properly.
Once I reverted to Java 1.0.5.11 on my PC I was fine.
- Review the default Sametime policies. I was not getting the “file send” feature in
the Notes 8 client. There is a ST
policy called “Allow all Sametime Connect features to be used with
integrated clients”. This was turned
off by default. By the way, if you
change the policies you don’t have to restart the entire ST server. Just restart the “stpolicy.exe” service.
- It seems they will be supporting
less features in DWA8 as they did in DWA7.
Features like “Who can see me online” are removed in DWA8.
- Sametime 8 handles user privacy
info differently. This is the “Who can
see me online” info for each user. You
have to run a little utility (upgrade_util.cmd) included in the upgrade to
convert the user privacy info. This was
actually changed in ST 7.5.1, but I was upgrading from 7.0.
The supported list of webcams only
has 3 webcams on it. These are the 3
webcams that development actually tested.
However IBM tech support did say that any quality USB webcam that
supports 640x480 and 30 frames per second should work.
Feel free to contact me if you
want more information about my upgrade experience.
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