Lotus Instant Messaging/Web Conferencing (Sametime): Building Sametime Enabled Applications

454 Lotus Instant Messaging/Web Conferencing (Sametime): Building Sametime-Enabled Applications

users on the system was not shown, either in terms of the number of IM sessions

or the amount of traffic within those sessions. It would have been possible to

show on the graph (perhaps by the thickness of the lines) the number of sessions

between two users, but to encourage people to use the system, this data was not

shown.

Any future development of VS will have to seriously consider privacy implications

so that people will be willing to use the system.

Future improvements

򐂰 Adapting the VS server to use the Intelligent Miner Modelling 8.1 for data

aggregation (rather than custom aggregation algorithm)

򐂰 Securing functionality to prevent data spoofing

򐂰 Setting up a temporal element to show IM traffic between specific times

򐂰 Automatic social network analysis

򐂰 Increased privacy protection

Lessons learned

Although VS is intended as a proof of concept system, a number of lessons were

learned regarding the building of Sametime-enabled applications.

1. Users do not expect to lose any functionality that exists in the

Sametime-based client they are currently using. Even in situations where the

additional features far outweighed any loss, users still demanded all the

functionality of their existing system.

2. Applications using Sametime functionality are likely to be left running on the

user’s desktop permanently and, therefore, need to be as lightweight as

possible. The resources used by the VS client has posed a problem to some

users. The overhead was mainly caused by the association graphing

facilities.

3. Privacy is a big issue for people using custom Sametime applications and

needs to be thought of while designing any Sametime-based application.

4. Careful use of threading needs to be used in applications built with Sametime

components in. It is important that the surrounding application does not hold

up the Sametime elements, as delays can be annoying to users.