A couple of clarifications and questions

[vaudeville]

The only reason I asked was that life steal via Hysteria with Skeletal Burst wasn't working for me yesterday.

I had the same problem with my Vengeance Paladin as well when I switched to using smite mid battle against a boss (I want to emphasize that again that I switched to using Smite and also tried Zeal as well) with 4 amn runes on the Griswold weapon, and I was barely healing myself (I'm guessing my Abyss Sphere did the most work here), so maybe you can understand my concern here. So maybe you can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

[vaudeville]

Scratch that last part. It is working when I switch to Zeal but not Smite sometimes. Is it that there needs to be some arbitrary minimum amount of damage I need to do (obviously above 0) to activate such?

[Mephisto]

The minor effects are a few: Smite can apply Crushing Blow and Open Wounds, but not Deadly Strike or elemental damage like fire etc. It doesn't receive any extra damage from the Sanctuary Aura.

Three aspects are however very important to remembed when using Smite

-Smite is not affected by Attack Rating, so it never misses its target, regardless of defense and level of the target monster.
-Smite does not work with Life/Mana steal. This is a major drawback in alter difficulties, as many melee classes rely heavily on life steal to stay alive.
-Smite can however steal life through Life Tap / Life on Hit.