Uh Clem's Admin World

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.