Jabber 11.x - New Chat Popup

[JRoberts6670]

My director has mentioned his dislike of Jabber mainly because the chat window does not move to the top when a new chat is started or a reply is received.

It looks like he wants us to move to Skype for business.   Not good.

[Mark Swanson]

Which version of Cisco Jabber do you have exactly?

Are you talking about the list chat sessions within the left pane of the Conversation window? If so, the order of these chat sessions is determined by when the conversation started. It doesn't automatically rearrange the list of chat sessions based on recent activity. However, you should be able to manually rearrange this list... I know this doesn't help, just saying.

Depending on which version of Cisco Jabber you have, new (unread) IMs would be identified by a highlighted chat session and/or by a number value displaying the number of new (unread) IMs.

How many chat sessions (windows) does your director normally have open at once? 

[Mark Swanson]

Consider this...

Imagine you're actively typing (responding) to a message sent by User A when another user (User B) sends you a message. Now, the 'active' chat window is User B. This would likely cause some frustration and confusion among users if they are responding to the wrong chat window or something interrupts them from responding to a message.

Test it and see what happens. Open multiple chat windows and while you respond to one chat window, click on another chat window. The message intended for one user is now spilt between multiple chat windows. And if you're someone who receives a ton of IMs... just imagine the 'active' chat window constantly changing every 10-20 seconds. That would be annoying.

[JRoberts6670]

I think that you may not fully understand my post.

Currently, I have Jabber open, but minimized.  When someone sends me a chat, the icon in the Windows task bar flashes.  That is all the notification I have if I have the volume low. 

When I am working in another application, I am focused there and do not notice the flashing icon.  I would like the chat window to be moved on top of the active window(s).  That way, I can visually be alerted that someone is sending me a message.  

I do not want a new conversation in the existing chat window to be selected taking focus away from the current conversation in which I am typing.

Does this make sense?

[JRoberts6670]

Jabber Version 11.8.4 Build 52954

I don't want to rearrange the chats in the chat window.
I want the chat window to have focus, moved to the top of the windows on my desktop so that I can be interrupted and see that someone wants my attention. Otherwise, it could be hours before I notice the little flashing icon in the task tray.

[Mark Swanson]

The feature you described would act the same way; meaning, if you received a new IM while responding to emails or whatever, then Jabber would interrupt your email to become the active window. As you already know, you can only have one active window.

Currently, this feature isn't available on Cisco Jabber but there's another feature (i.e. parameter) called Persist IM Notifications. By default, the value of this parameter is false (disabled). As you receive new IMs, you should notice a small IM notification window in the top right corner of your desktop. This IM notification fades after a few seconds. You can alter the behavior of this feature by modifying the jabber-config.xml file. If you change this value to true, then IM notifications wouldn't fade away but instead, they would stack on top of each other until you dismiss the IM notification. The IM notifications wouldn't interrupt whatever you're doing but it should be noticeable to the user.

Here you go...

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/jabber/11_8/cjab_b_parameters-reference-guide-jabber-118/cjab_b_parameters-reference-guide-jabber-118_chapter_011.html

Search for PersistIMNotifications.

[Mark Swanson]

I stumbled across these old discussions;

https://supportforums.cisco.com/t5/jabber-clients/jabber-for-windows-chat-window-screen-pop/td-p/1946847

https://communities.cisco.com/thread/31845?start=15&tstart=0

As you can see, this feature request has been long discussed and debated for years. At one point, it looked like the developers were planning to release this feature with v10.5 but it looks like they pulled this feature. According to reply #44 (https://communities.cisco.com/thread/31845?start=30&tstart=0), they stated;

"As I mentioned in an earlier post it is not best policy, as dictated by Microsoft, and it can lead to users experiencing missed key strokes when the IM window pops to the foreground."

This is exactly what I stated before... as a potential problem with other applications. My only advice is... you can reach out to the developers and ask them. I doubt they're going to reconsider but you never know.