Integrating Sametime 11 with iNotes and Verse on Premises

I struggled a bit in setting up integration of Sametime 11 with Domino web mail, both iNotes and VoP, but eventually with the help from the great Trevor Tallackson of HCL Sametime Support I succeeded.

There are some things not obvious to do to set this up, and the one for VoP made me almost drop my jaw when Trevor suggested it 🙂

iNotes Web Access
I have installed both Community Server and Proxy Server on the same machine, so in the Domino Configuration document for my server, in the tab iNotes, in the Sametime section I have put the hostname of my server as “Location of the Sametime proxy server to use when using https:” which is https://domino.eld.it:8443

With this setting, which is absolutely normal and obvious, the integration doesn’t work.
When I opened iNotes I got in the browser an error:
Network failure: 0 [https://domino.eld.it:8443/chat/stbaseapi/latest/baseComps.js?lang=en] (EGe)
Network failure: 0 [https://domino.eld.it:8443/chat/stbaseapi/latest/baseComps.js?lang=en] (EGe)
Error encountered retrieving data: Bad HTTP status: 0 ()

The solution was to create an entry in the hosts file with the same IP address but a different name, I used proxy.eld.it, then used this in the configuration document

It seems that the iNotes and Proxy servers need to have different hostnames

Verse on Premises
The integration was not working and I saw some errors in the browser console
Request URL:https://domino.eld.it/stwebclient/latest/include.js?lang=en
Request Method:GET
Remote Address:192.168.1.12:443

404

We could not understand why though in the notes.ini of the server the parameters were correct, the server tried to access domino.eld.it and not proxy.eld.it
In my notes.in i I had this
iNotes_WA_SametimeProxy=1
iNotes_WA_SametimeProxyServer=http://proxy.eld.it:8080
iNotes_WA_SametimeProxyServerSSL=https://proxy.eld.it:8443
VOP_GK_sametime=1
VOP_GK_sametime_rich_client=0

Trevor checked his notes.ini on the server where the integration was working and saw that those lines were all caps and wrote me:

This may seem silly, but try the notes.ini parameters all in caps.  Here is our production server’s notes.ini (that is working fine).
INOTES_WA_SAMETIMEPROXYSERVERSSL=https://<Our_hostname>;
VOP_GK_SAMETIME=1
VOP_GK_SAMETIME_RICH_CLIENT=1

I tried his suggestion and guess what ? It worked!
Honestly I have no idea why with V11 the lines have to be all caps, I told Trevor that I leave up to him to find the reason, but as silly as it may seem this is the solution. I would never have guessed it in a million years…..