@URLOpen, skype:protocols, and Lotus Notes 8

08/22/2007 07:20 PM by Chris Toohey

My DIY Skype Integration wasn't very ND8-compatible. Well, it's not very compatible with Lotus Notes 8 out-of-the-box, I should say. See - I did a clean install of Lotus Notes 8 on one of my machines in the office after someone (that was using the technique from the article) pointed the issue out to me. The default behavior is for Lotus Notes to attempt to use the built-in web navigator to launch the URL triggered by the @URLOpen(... call - which I totally get - but I had used this Function to allow for some pretty simple-and-usable calls to the skype:.. protocol. Running this same code in Lotus Notes 8, I would get a new, failed instance of the web navigator - and then Skype would accept the call to it's registered protocol and continue as desired.

As some of you might have caught at this point, the "clean install"/default value for the integrated web browsing in the Lotus Notes client was configured to use the embedded client. In doing so, it would die a most ugly death on the screen. Soooo, we simply change the option to use the system's user-defined default web browser:

Sometimes, with newly released products, you assume it's a bug that you'll have to live with instead of something as simple as a preference change... I'm just glad I found it before I started a whole FUD 8 release campaign!