Introduction

The “classic” IBM® Sametime® Meeting Center product (that is, older versions of IBM Sametime Meetings) is based on IBM® Lotus® Domino®, with a major dependency on Java^TM applets loading for meetings. If a user’s system does not possess the compatible Java applets, Meetings will not be initiated or attended.

This limitation has been overcome in IBM Sametime Meeting Center 8.5.2. This product is based on IBM WebSphere® and Ajax, which is independent of Java applets for scheduling or attending the meetings, and has a persistent meeting room option as well. However, the latest version does not have the direct ability to “schedule” meetings due to the presence of the persistent (permanent) meeting room option.

To overcome these limitations, a “custom application” has been developed with an interface for performing scheduling / rescheduling / deleting actions for meetings.

Existing Sametime Meeting Service 8.5 limitations/concerns

The following are the existing Sametime Meeting Service 8.5 limitations/concerns:

• Unused persistent meeting rooms. Currently, the meeting is created on the WebSphere- based Sametime Meeting Server, using persistence rooms that are available to users all the time.

• Inability to reuse persistent meeting rooms for multiple meetings due to common password. There is no option provided for resetting the password for the persistent meeting rooms, once an instance of an active meeting is over. For example, after a meeting with Customer A is over, if the owner schedules the meeting with Customer B using the same persistent meeting room, then Customer A can again join the same meeting with same password, posing major security threat.

• Absence of reschedule or repeat meeting. This option is unavailable in Sametime Meeting Server 8.5.

Application approach

Figure 1 illustrates the existing meeting process flow for the scheduling options available for users in Sametime Meeting Center 8.0.2.

Figure 1. Existing process flow in classic Sametime Meeting Server



Figure 2 illustrates the new meeting process flow with the “custom application” interface developed for providing the schedule/reschedule ability for booking meetings.

Figure 2. New process flow in Sametime Meeting Server 8.5 using “custom application”


The custom application interface is available to all users through various Web browsers. Users can schedule an online meeting by providing details such as Meeting name, description, password, start date, start time, duration, internal invitees, and external invitees and, once these details are submitted, the scheduled Notes-based agent (a program coded to achieve a particular task) will be triggered.

The agent saves the meeting and sends an email invite to all the invitees inclusive of the meeting details and ICS file (Microsoft® Calendar format file). By importing the ICS file, invitees can make an entry in their respective mailing calendar application.

The Sametime Meetings Remote Client Software Development Kits (SDK) is used to create meetings (meeting rooms) on a WebSphere-based Sametime Meeting Server one day prior to the meeting's scheduled date, and this scheduled agent sends another email with the Web URL to access the online meeting to all internal and external attendees.

Internal users can attend a meeting by entering their Sametime username and password, whereas external users enter their display name and use the meeting password contained in the email to authenticate and enter the meeting. Having external users enter a meeting password ensures that the external users are authenticated. The access provided to external users can be managed though policies on Sametime Meeting Server.

Table 1 summarizes the details of how the limitation/concerns stated in Section 1.1 are overcome with our application solution approach.

Table 1. Limitations and solutions

Limitation	Solution
Unused persistent meeting rooms	Creation of rooms only on an “on-demand” basis and deletion of the same post 5 hours after the meeting end time.
Inability to reuse persistent meeting rooms for multiple meetings due to common password	Persistent meeting rooms are created and deleted after each meeting; hence for every new meeting, a new meeting room with fresh log-in credentials is used.
External participants' log-in authentication issues	A custom Log-in page is created to ensure internal users log in using Sametime credentials, and external users log in with the display name and defined password.
Absence of reschedule or repeat meeting	Custom application allows option to “reschedule / repeat” meetings