January 2000

Just a short note with a suggestion. Since you are using an NT server, it is possible to “reserve” a specific IP address for your boss’ laptop in your DHCP settings. All you need is to know the MAC address of his network card. You then input that in DHCP settings. By doing so, when the DHCP server sees the specific MAC address it will assign the same “reserved” IP address. Now you can put that IP address into your DOS batch file hack (until your boss changes his laptop’s network adapter).

Gregorio Villafana

Tom Keating replies:

Thanks for the suggestion. Actually, I was referring to the IP address given by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) not our internal DHCP server. Since Rich Tehrani has a cable modem, he can request a static IP address, but for dial-up Internet connections, unfortunately, you’ll still need to run winipcfg.exe to find out which IP address was given out by the ISP.

The following letter refers to the TMC Labs review of Lotus Sametime 1.5 in the December issue of CTI�:

Thank you for the thorough review that you gave the Lotus Sametime 1.5 product. I am a designer for the Sametime product, and I want to make sure I understand your comments on the areas for improvement so that we can address these issues in the next release.

In the “Room for Improvement” Section, the reviewer comments: “As mentioned above, Sametime could really benefit from the addition of toolbars. When using the product through a browser, you have to click the back links to find menus. A toolbar here to jump directly between menus (perhaps with the inclusion of mouse-over submenus)” Did you encounter this problem mainly in the Online meeting center, once you were in a meeting? Or are you talking about being in a discussion database and wanting to go right to the Meeting Center?

You also mention: “We like the simplicity of adding users and groups, but we’d like to see more Windows conventions used for this… For example, items like adding users, chatting in a forum, and sharing an application are all easy to do but incorporate non-standard methods.” By adding users, do you mean an end-user adding people to their Connect list, or a system administrator adding people to the address book?

Also, I am not sure what it is about chatting in a forum or sharing an application that is non-standard, and if you have the specific details, please share them. (Yes, it might indeed be that I have been living with Lotus Notes so long that I cannot tell if something is Windows-compliant any more!)

Mary Elizabeth Raven

TMC Labs Technology Editor Evan Koblentz responds:

Mary, thank you for the compliments. You bring up many good issues.

After we received this letter, Mary and I spoke on the telephone. We agreed that there are some places where Sametime is indeed non-standard and could use improvement. We also agreed that the product review itself could have used more precise explanations of the Sametime’s shortcomings. We in TMC Labs apologize for any confusion this may have caused our readers.

The toolbars reference applied consistently throughout the Sametime GUI. During our test, we found that in most cases, you have to click the browser’s back button as many times as the number of pages back you wish to go. A universal navigation toolbar is definitely needed here. For the navigation functions, Lotus seemed to overlook the “H” (hypertext) in HTML. For a complex application that’s designed for the enterprise, anything they can do to ease navigation and the learning curve seems like a natural feature to add.

Regarding the user contacts experience: Our comments applied mainly to the administrator’s interface. Since Sametime is designed for mid- to large-sized organizations, an administrator will spend a lot of time adding users. Having to enter each user manually (when all of the information is already in the company’s e-mail database) seems like a waste of time. There should be an import feature from Exchange, or at least from the Windows NT user manager. Again, this improvement seems like common sense to us.

Finally, our criticisms with the chat room pertained to its look and feel more than its operational testing. To use all of the features of a single text chat within the meeting center requires opening four separate windows! We’re impressed that the Lotus developers thought of incorporating the common AOL Instant Messenger applet instead of building their own, and we agree that the applet definitely needed more features for Lotus users to take it seriously as a business tool. But we think they’ve gone too far when multiple windows must clutter your desktop to make just one secure chat session.