Lotus Shade of Yellow

I forgot to mention in the previous article (and was quickly reminded of that - thanks!) that installing Quickr and Sametime on the same Domino server is not officially supported. We decided to try it because we were interested to see if it would work. We also needed to come up with a demo environment quickly and with using as little hardware resources as possible.

We also think that this configuration might be interesting for small companies that are always short on IT funds. (On the other hand, small companies hardly need Sametime, so this argument kind of kills itself. Still, it's always fun to experiment.)

As it turns out everything works just fine, a nice testimony to the robustness of the Lotus platform.

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We are preparing a Quickr demo for a customer. Since we want to spend as little time as possible on setup and installation, we decided to try to install everything on the same machine. So we installed Domino 8.5, configured the basic things and added a few users. Then we installed Quickr 8.2 for Domino. Created a few places, everything worked as expected.

On top of it all we installed Sametime 8.0.2. We edited qpconfig.xml file as per instructions in the Quickr 8.2 for Domino Information Center in order to enable presence awareness. Everything seemed to work fine until we tried to open a place in Firefox - and were greated by an empty page. The same place loaded correctly in Internet Explorer. Hmm, it was troubleshooting time!

A quick look at the Domino console revealed an error that occurred each time Firefox tried to fetch a page:
Class QuickrSupportUtil could not be located

A Google search found very little, but it did point in right direction: file servlet.properties located in [Domino Data] directory.

We opened the servlet.properties file on our server and found various references for Sametime servlets, but none for Quickr. We opened the servlet.properties on our production Quickr server and saw three lines of Quickr references:
servlet.QuickrSupportUtil.code=com.lotus.quickplace.util.QuickrSupportUtil
servlet.QuickrEntry.code=com.lotus.quickplace.util.QuickrEntry
servlet.QPServlet.code=com.lotus.quickplace.util.QPServlet

So, we simply copied these lines to the servlet.properties file on our demo server, making sure we do not alter any of the Sametime references. We restarted the server and checked the place in Firefox: everything OK!

It seems that the Sametime installation replaces the contents of the servlet.properties file thus deleting all necessary Quickr references. I guess that Internet Explorer was not affected because it used ActiveX controls to render page.

There you have it - easy way to work around this small, but potentially annoying bug. Hopefully, IBM will also fix the Sametime installer and prevent this from happening.

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