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Using LotusLive with Google Chrome

06/24/2011 02:26 PM by Chris Toohey

IBM LotusLive @ LotusLive.com Lotus Connections - specifically, LotusLive - can be picky when it comes to browser support. Here is a quick way to get LotusLive working in Google Chrome (until someone updates their User Agent accept list!)

Google Chrome supports a switch named --user-agent, which can be set in the Windows Shortcut Target using the following syntax:


--user-agent="<Desired UserAgent>"

For example, I have a Google Chrome shortcut setup to report as Mozilla Firefox 4.0.1:


C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe 
--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 
Firefox/4.0.1"

Once I close all instances of Google Chrome and re-launch it using my updated shortcut, I'm able to successfully spoof the Google Chrome UserAgent:

Google Chrome using --user-agent switch for Mozilla Firefox 4.0, showing
UserAgentString.com

LotusLive Meetings apparently employ a whitelist of supported Web Browsers and blocks everything else. It appears that Google Chrome is not on that list:

LotusLive Meetings in Google Chrome -- Unsupported Web Browser

However, after changing my UserAgent via the --user-agent switch, I'm able to successfully use LotusLive.com Meetings with Google Chrome!

LotusLive Meetings in Google Chrome

While this allows you to start meetings in Chrome, the only way this method will allow you to click-and-join meetings via Google Chrome is if you already have an instance of Google Chrome opened which originated from the shortcut employing the --user-agent switch.

You can elect to modify your system registry and add the --user-agent switch, which will allow you to click-and-join a meeting without the need to have a switched-instance of Google Chrome already running... but you could run the risk of negating any Webkit-friendly functionality that a site might be offering based on your reported UserAgent.

Thus, you can instead opt to report your UserAgent as Safari (which of course works fine...):


C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe 
--user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) 
AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1"

At the end of the day, it's kinda silly that you have to employ such measures just to use a quite-frankly slick solution like LotusLive.com... and perhaps I can reach out to whomever manages the whitelist and see if we can get Google Chrome added.

At least there's an option for those of us using Google Chrome and LotusLive.com Meetings!

About the author: Chris Toohey

Thought Leadership, Web & Mobile Application Development, Solutions Integration, Technical Writing & Mentoring

A published developer and webmaster of dominoGuru.com, Chris Toohey specializes in platform application development, solutions integration, and evangelism of platform capabilities and best practices.