Sametime variables and InstallShield Tuner  

For a while now one of the most popular blog entries that I have has been the ones regarding using InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes. ISTfLN can be used to generate a custom silent install that can be used with either Smart Upgrade, SMS or other manual process to push out and install the Lotus Notes client to your users. While in the past the product has been a real time saver for client installs, I'm finding now that some of the settings I've come to rely upon for Sametime no longer work.
When generating a package with ISTfLN, you have the ability to add in variables to the systems notes.ini when either installing for the first time or upgrading. Three notes.ini variables that I've come to rely upon for setting users Sametime presence awareness have been:
$STActiveToAwayEnabled=1
$STAwayToActiveEnabled=1
$STActiveToAwayTimeout=5
Basically, the first two settings are telling Notes that when the user is away for X amount of minutes, (the third setting is the amount of minutes), then set the users status in Sametime to away. But when the user is back and there is activity from the keyboard or mouse, set the status to active. This had become a must have for users who were getting pinged constantly when they were away from their desk for an extended period by people who thought that they were there. So it was only natural to think that when Lotus Notes 8.x hit the streets those settings would still work in the notes.ini. They do if you are running the Lotus Notes Basic client either installed only as the Basic or when running the Basic client from a Standard installation, (either running nlnotes.exe or using the shortcut that has -sa or -basic included in the shortcut).
But if you are planning on installing and running the full-blown Standard client, you can forget about those settings being used in the system. Because of the nature of the Standard client, the Sametime portion acts like a separately installed product and does not recognize any settings from the clients notes.ini. When I addressed this issue to Lotus Support today, I found that there is no way either in the notes.ini or a policy in Domino to control how a users Auto-Staus Changes setting are controlled. Users will have to manually set a time for their client along with any other settings in the Preferences-Sametime-Auto-Status Changes window . When I asked if that was going to be fixed, the support guy told me that it is already an SPR for future release.
Likely 8.5.
Bummer.