I’ve been investigating ways to add presence awareness to Lotus Connections using Microsoft’s Live Communication Server instead of Lotus Sametime. I’ve been using Dogear and Google to find resources on this topic. Below is a result so far of my research. There are two high-level ways to approach this:
Option 1
- Relies on DLLs installed on a user’s workstation to enable presence awareness in applications such web.
Pros:
* Very little code to write
Cons:
* Only works on Windows workstations
* Requires a DLL to be installed (or Microsoft Office 2003 installed and configured to talk to the Live Communication Server)
* Can’t customize the user interface (provided by the DLL / ActiveX object)
Option 2
- Relies on AJAX and JSON calls to access Microsoft Communicator Web Access (CWA). This SDK allows developers to write their own IM client.
Pros:
* OS-independent
* Browser-independent
* Customizable UI
* Already used in other parts of GM
Cons:
* Requires more code than option 1 — I believe it can be generalized though…
Based on this, it’s looking as option 2 is the preferred route. I’m going to develop some sample code and test it out today and see if it works. I’ll keep you posted!