Restrict Access to Sametime Web Proxy Widget in Connections

Customer would like to access Sametime web proxy through Connections via LDAP group membership.

The customer has requested that access to Sametime be limited to a specific LDAP group, which has been configured. They would like to prevent the Sametime proxy widget from loading in the Connections pages if the user is not part of the specified AD group.

What is happening is the user is being prompted for credentials to log into Sametime which they cannot do due to the security change. If they hit the cancel button, the Sametime status still appears on the bottom right of the browser within the ST widget as "Loading Sametime status..." (see uploaded clip).

To further complicate things, each time the user performs an action (e.g. navigate to another page), the Sametime login prompt re-appears. Even without performing an action, the Sametime login prompt will re-appear. This means using a css trick to 'hide' the widget will not be sufficient. It may be possible to add some script to forcibly delete the widget iframe from the page after load, but I wanted to see if there is a way to control the widget properly.