As some of you may know, Epilio is basically
a virtual organization, we do not have a need for a physical office with
employees working from home or on-site at customer location. This
has never proven an issue, as we can communicate very well using IM and
online meetings. When we do need to have a physical meeting
we'll often combine it with a dinner in a restaurant, rent a meeting room
at a hotel or use a service like REGUS. So prior to Sametime 8.5
we would actually use Sametime meetings and p2p voice chat quite a bit,
with the built in Sametime audio features. With Sametime 8.5.x IBM
broke all that for us.
Our Sametime setup really wasn't anything
complex, and our home networks are mainly pretty basic, running simple
things like a $50 linksys router (unless you're one of our uber geeks who
have along with their servers have a rack mounted firewalls in their house).
We have our Servers running on VMWare ESXi servers out in the cloud, keeping
our home electricity bills down, and not using up precious bandwidth when
customers are uploading or downloading files. This all worked fine
with Sametime 8.0.x but things changed in Sametime 8.5, Sametime 8.5 audio/video
and media server is basically useless unless you are on the same network
as the server. IM works fine, Meetings work fine, but audio/video
just can't work in that configuration.
Personally I think IBM didn't really
see this as an issue during the betas and during their own usage because
they all access the IBM network over a VPN, guess what we, and many other
companies don't do that. Fortunately since 8.5 shipped IBM has had
feedback from many companies like my own where this just broke how they
had Sametime deployed, so they are working on a fix for a future build.
Ironically, 8.5 which was supposed to make us use Sametime more actually
made us use Skype more which is never a good thing as users say things
like "Hey this just works and it's free right?".
Anyway, this blog is titled how to use
audio/video in Sametime 8.5.x so we must have solved it right, yes we did.
I wanted a simple VPN to manage, that would still allow people access
to their regular network and wouldn't pass all their network traffic through
it. Many VPNs, you connect to it and then all your traffic goes through
that VPN server, so I was looking for a quick simple solution that could
do the job. The solution for me was LogMeIn Hamachi.
LogMeIn Hamachi has a few virtual network type options, a mesh network,
a hub and spoke network or a gateway network. It looked like Mesh would
do what I needed. A mesh network allows you to see each others machine
in the network directly with no firewall interaction, and gives each machine
a virtual IP address.
I installed the Hamachi client on the
sametime servers and on each machine that needed to access Mesh network
. The small VPN client that loads shows you each of the other machines
in the mesh network and their virtual IP Addresses. All I had to
do was modify the hosts file to add the virtual IP addresses for the sametime
community and sametime media server, and the client could then login and
get audio/video services.
Another one speaking at IamLUG
Tue, Apr 30th 2013 8:50a Carl Tyler Like many others I will be in St. Louis
next week, speaking at IamLUG, and Epilio
are sponsoring the Monday night drinks. I decided not to do any really
tough presentations on Sametime, but am instead doing an updated version
of a presentation I first did at UKLUG "25 Years of Lotus and Still
Going Strong" which contains lots of demos of old Lotus products.
As usual, I'll probably have some old freebies to give away.
If you've not already registered yourself,
you better get o [read] Keywords: lotus
sametime
153
Fat man walking...all for a good cause.
Mon, Feb 11th 2013 1:40p Carl Tyler It's time for you to reach into your pockets
and sponsor me. Perhaps you've used our free plug-ins, perhaps you've
used our free Sametime admin tools, it's time to pay up. Now it's
not like that crazy sponsorship thing where all I had to do was shave my
head and paint my face blue, this one actually involves some serious preparation
and training. We managed to raise close to $3,000 dollars for the head
shave, so really hoping people will delve deep for this effort to smash
that amo [read] Keywords: admin
domino
sametime
IBM Connect 2013 Slides and flying
Wed, Feb 6th 2013 8:20a Carl Tyler Here are the slides that William Holmes
and I presented at IBM Connect 2013 for session AD109.
AD109 -
Using the IBM Sametime Proxy SDK: WebSphere Portal, IBM Connections - and
Beyond from Carl Tyler and William Holmes
This is the sample file I showed for
having a button appear if a user, or number of users are online or offline.
Other Connect 2013 stuff.
As many know, I decided to fly myself
down to Orlando this year. So I left with a temperature of -5F/-20C
a [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
sametime
css
dojo
javascript
server
websphere
websphere portal
widgets
162
IBM Connect 2013 a.k.a. Lotusphere 2013
Wed, Jan 16th 2013 11:50a Carl Tyler OK, it's not called Lotusphere anymore,
it's called IBM Connect 2013, and looking at the exhibitor list it's becoming
a combo HR/formerly Lotus stuff/Social IBM trade show. I really don't
have a problem with the name, and honestly, I have so much yellow s*&t
around the house I'll be glad to see the back of it. I also don't
have a problem with the show evolving and changing into something else.
If it didn't it would just keep dying. I will be there, looking to
embrace the new [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
sametime
email
websphere
websphere portal
161
A slightly different review of 2012
Wed, Jan 2nd 2013 10:10a Carl Tyler Sure, I could blog about how my blog posts
are down, but Facebook posts are up, but who cares about that, here it
is, all my 2012 flying videos in chronological order...
Taking off
from Alton Bay Ice Runway (B18) from Carl
Tyler on Vimeo.
Piper Cherokee
departing Oswego, NY from Carl
Tyler on Vimeo.
Niagara Falls
- May 2012 from Carl
Tyler on Vimeo.
Flying in
Formation behind Glen Salmon [read] Keywords: facebook
98
A word of warning to those thinking of leaving IBM
Mon, Dec 10th 2012 9:00a Carl Tyler Late on Friday night I got a call from
a distraught friend, their daughter had been playing with their mobile
phone, and whilst the child was playing with the phone, the device had
prompted for a password, after their 5th attempt at entering a password
the device reset itself to Factory settings. So what had happened?
Well about 3 months ago this person
was let got by IBM, prior to that, they had been using their own iPhone
as their business phone, you know all that we're so tight s [read] Keywords: ibm
iphone
laptop
mobile
password
security
89
Add some Bling to Sametime on your iOS device.
Mon, Oct 8th 2012 11:40a Carl Tyler Use Sametime on your iOS device? Want
to add some bling to your messages?
No problem, just install Emoji as an
additional keyboard and you can send messages that contain all sorts of
coloured emoticons. If the person on the receiving end is using a
Windows device, they'll see them as black and white Emoji (Windows doesn't
have coloured fonts), Mac devices will see the full colour. Why do
this instead of using emoticons? Well with these you're not sending jpgs
around your organi [read] Keywords: sametime
mac
mobile
