Many organizations are beginning to upgrade their IBM Lotus Notes clients from releases 6.5.x and 7.0.x to 8.x. The earlier releases only included integrated IBM Lotus Sametime presence, awareness, and chat services (see Figure 1). With the release of Notes 8.x (standard configuration), the client now has a feature-rich Eclipse framework and a full Sametime Connect client that IBM integrated into the sidebar (see Figure 2).

The new integration gives users the full Sametime Connect experience, including click-to-call functionality and a single interface to both audio and Web conferencing. For more information on the Eclipse framework of Notes 8.x, read Jo Grant’s article, “Moving to Notes 8: What Every Notes Professional Must Know About the Eclipse Rich Client Platform” (THE VIEW, January/February 2008).

If your organization upgrades to a Notes 8.x client from release 6.5.x or 7.0.x, administrators will notice that the old Sametime integration starts in the background when end users log into the new integrated Sametime Connect client. I’ll explain why this behavior happens and how to prevent it.