With more and more companies using instant messaging, saving important text conversations becomes vital. IBM Lotus Sametime has always had the capability to save a chat transcript, but with releases before version 7, the user needed to make a conscious decision to save a chat. Since the introduction of Sametime Connect version 7, administrators can configure Sametime to save chat transcripts automatically.

Because Sametime can automatically save chat transcripts, however, it also has to manage those transcripts in a meaningful way. But what happens when chat management breaks down and piles of chat history disappear? What do you do if one day you select File → Open Chat History in Sametime Connect V7 and later and everything is gone? Often when chat history seems to have disappeared, it’s merely a problem with an incomplete XML file and you can recover it.

To give you some background on the problem, I’ll discuss the structure of Sametime’s chat-transcript storage. Then I’ll present some potential causes of this problem and provide three possible solutions.