April 05, 2007

Enable the business card photo in Sametime7.5

I thought it would take a mouse click or two to turn on this feature. It actually takes more than that. You have to be a designer and an administrator but once that's fixed it is done in 5-10 minutes.

I found a complete and very good tutorial at Bingham's blog.
When the Domino 7 server was new and no one really thought about the coming Domino 8 server, the idea was to add a field in the middle of the person form in which the photo would be inserted. But then someone clever thought about the possibility that the template pubnames.ntf might be changed on regular basis and thereby the changes would be wiped out when upgrading to the next server version.

Therefore a similar solution has been recommended by IBM. An empty subform called "$PersonExtensibleSchema" will instead be used to add a rich text field, in which the business card photo should be inserted. This subform is inserted in the Person form on the Other tab. So once this change is made by a designer on the template and the design has been refreshed on names.nsf, each user can add their own photo in their person document.

Before this works a little configuration is needed on the sametime server that is done via the web browser (stcenter.nsf). And finally a restart of the sametime server.

This is how my business card looks like when I have made all the changes.




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2 comments:

Bryan Kuhn said...

Cool stuff, Looks like I'm really late getting to this feature. I agree with you that you shouldn't have to modify the design to add a picture. It should be an easy create-picture in the person doc. And at most "tell adminp process new" to complete the update. Do you have an AOL screenname or use Trillian?

Niklas Waller said...

No, neither actually. But I use gTalk and MSN where username is my gmail address.