 | Level: Introductory Nancy Kruse Hannigan (nancy_hannigan@us.ibm.com), Web Content Developer, IBM
Stephen Londergan (stephen_londergan@us.ibm.com), Product Marketing Manager, IBM
04 Dec 2007
Updated 13 Dec 2007 Learn about the extended family of IBM Lotus Sametime V8 software: Lotus Sametime Entry, Lotus Sametime Standard, Lotus Sametime Advanced, and Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony."
On November 27, 2007, IBM announced the next phase of the IBM strategy for Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC²): the new members of the IBM Lotus Sametime family. Building on the success of Lotus Sametime product, IBM offers a family of real-time and community collaboration products that address the entry-level, standard, and advanced needs of organizations of any size. New features, new platforms, and new ways of thinking about collaboration and productivity characterize this announcement.
Now, Lotus Sametime offers solutions for organizations that are just getting started with enterprise instant messaging (IM) and for those that are ready for new real-time collaboration and community capabilities.
The IBM UC2 strategy is to foster innovation and business agility by making it easier for people to find, reach, and collaborate through a unified communications experience. IBM accomplishes this by delivering an open and extensible software platform that integrates rich presence, IM, email, unified messaging, web, voice, video, telephony, and business applications across multi-vendor environments.
The Lotus Sametime family
There will be four members of the Lotus Sametime family:
- IBM Lotus Sametime Entry
- IBM Lotus Sametime Standard
- IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced
- IBM Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony"
Lotus Sametime Entry and Lotus Sametime Standard are now available; Lotus Sametime Advanced and Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" are currently planned to be available later in 2008.
Lotus Sametime Entry
Lotus Sametime Entry is designed for companies looking to get started with enterprise IM capabilities at an affordable price. This solution offers the flexibility to deploy it on a variety of client and server operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Linux. It provides encrypted and authenticated presence and IM capabilities that can be integrated with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook and with IBM Lotus Notes. You can integrate Lotus Sametime Entry into your email environment to see contextual awareness and to start IM sessions from your email.
Some of the key features of Lotus Sametime Entry include:
- Presence awareness and IM as shown in figure 1
- Integration with email and productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office
- Multi-way chat
- Rich text, time stamps, spell check, and emoticons
- Contact type-ahead search and contact detail display
- Local chat history
- Contacts list management as shown in figure 2: Sort contacts list, Show short names, Show online contacts only
Figure 1. The chat window in Lotus Sametime Entry
Figure 2. Contacts list
You can deploy Lotus Sametime Entry behind your corporate firewall and safeguard IM with password protection, controlled user access with authentication against the enterprise directory, and end-to-end encryption.
Lotus Sametime Entry can scale from dozens to hundreds of thousands of users. And because it can be monitored by your IT department, it can be managed according to your organization's security policies.
In addition, Lotus Sametime Entry can work with Microsoft Office Smart tags, so that you can right-click a person's name in Microsoft Office and instantly start a chat with that person. See figure 3.
Figure 3. Using Smart tags in Microsoft Office
Lotus Sametime Standard
IBM Lotus Sametime Standard offers integrated, enterprise instant messaging, VoIP, video chats, and Web conferencing capabilities with the security features required for business use. Lotus Sametime Standard is the upgrade/entitlement path for current customers with previous releases of Lotus Sametime.
As a platform for unified communications and collaboration, Lotus Sametime Standard combines security features with an extensible, open solution that includes integrated VoIP and point-to-point video within the enterprise, geographic location awareness, managed interoperability with supported public IM networks, and mobile clients. The built-in VoIP feature lets you talk with your colleagues as shown in figure 4.
Figure 4. The VoIP feature of Lotus Sametime Standard
The screen capture tool, shown in figure 5, lets you instantly share content from your desktop.
Figure 5. The screen capture tool in Lotus Sametime Standard
Figure 6 shows a standard plug-in used with the Contacts list to display sales data. Figure 7 shows how a plug-in that works with Microsoft Outlook lets you start Lotus Sametime chats from within your Microsoft Outlook Inbox.
Figure 6. Standard plug-in
Figure 7. A plug-in in Microsoft Outlook
Lotus Sametime Standard offers these new features:
- Improved performance, allowing IBM Lotus Sametime Connect to start more quickly and chat histories to open almost twice as fast
- Enhanced Microsoft Office integration
- Apple Macintosh enhancements including Apple Leopard OS 10.5 support, point-to-point video, location awareness, alerts -- bouncing dock icon -- on new and incoming IMs, and the ability to launch Lotus Lotus Sametime Connect at startup
- Enhancements including support for new devices: RIM BlackBerry 8300 Series (Curve), Nokia E-series E51/E65/E90, Sony Ericsson P1i, and Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 devices (Standard and Professional); enhanced new message notification; and reduction of as much as 50 percent in idle power/bandwidth consumption
- New tools to annotate a screen capture before sending them to a chat partner -- you can now draw lines, arrows, squares, and circles
- New annotation tools that make it easier to highlight screen captures before sending them to a chat partner, plus the ability to capture a screen and copy or save it as an image file, even if you're not in a chat
- New options for single sign-on (SSO)
- Improved display quality when a Web conference participant selects the Fit to screen option with the buttons now visible in full-screen mode, so that it's easier to return to the meeting room
- Web conference participants' abiity to share applications from desktop clients running IBM AIX or Sun Solaris
- Ability to deploy a Lotus Sametime server on IBM Lotus Domino V8
- Ability to run a Lotus Sametime server in a VMWare environment
- Additional Lotus Sametime APIs that can expand the possibilities and opportunities for IBM Business Partners, such as integrating Bluetooth headsets, providing more functions for chat logging, displaying telephony status for a person, and more
- Support for federation with Jabber-based and XMPP-based IM communities, including TLS support when you connect to XMPP communities (if the particular XMPP server in question supports it) and the ability to add an XMPP proxy server to the cluster configuration
IBM Lotus Sametime Enterprise Meeting Server offers clustering and failover capabilities for high-reliability Web conferences, and it supports Lotus Sametime Standard deployments.
Lotus Sametime Advanced
Lotus Sametime Advanced software is currently planned to include all the capabilities of Lotus Sametime Standard software, combined with additional functionality for real-time personal, team, and community collaboration.
Lotus Sametime Advanced software will help make it easy to find information and share expertise, to engage in ongoing conversations, to instantly share your desktop, and to automatically store and reuse location information.
Lotus Sametime Advanced is currently planned to provide business value by letting you:
- Search for experts and answers, even when you don't know which person to ask
- Capture business knowledge in real time so that you can build a knowledge base, which can reduce burdens on your help desk
- Drive users to consult the knowledge base
- Provide a forum for team members to share information with each other in real time
- Exploit geographic location awareness as a way to reduce costs, improve customer service, and optimize teams
There are four key capabilities planned for Lotus Sametime Advanced:
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Persistent chat. This feature will help you keep a continuous chat discussion running on a specific topic within a community of people who are interested in the topic.
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Broadcast tools. This feature will help you create interest- or team-based broadcast communities. You will be able to send chats, polls, announcements, or skill tap questions to all members of the community at the same time – and get answers from people you might not even know.
Skill tap questions let experts volunteer to help within a specific community. They can include an expertise rating and the ability to archive responses for future searches or creation of FAQs.
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Instant share. This feature will let you instantly share your screen with one or more of your IM contacts.
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Location services. This feature will allow you to store locations and make them easy to use for others. You will also be able to use location-based plug-ins (for example, Nearby Buddies).
Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony"
Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" is a new offering being designed to make it easy to access and manage telephone communications from inside Lotus Sametime or the Lotus Notes client. It is currently planned to extend the value of Lotus Sametime and your existing telephony investments by letting you:
- On the frontend, initiate calls and take action on incoming calls from within Lotus Sametime or the Lotus Notes client
- On the backend, connect multiple, mixed telephony systems
IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte
In August 2007, IBM acquired WebDialogs, a leading provider of Web conferencing services that make it easy for companies of any size to collaborate beyond the corporate intranet. The addition of the WebDialogs Unyte product, now called IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte, extends the Lotus Sametime portfolio with Web conferencing services and into small and medium businesses and departments in large enterprises.
Conclusion
The new IBM Lotus Sametime family offers a family of real-time and community collaboration products that address the entry-level, standard, and advanced needs of organizations of any size.
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About the authors | | | Nancy Kruse Hannigan is a Web Content Developer for developerWorks Lotus. She recently joined the developerWorks team to manage the technical articles program for Lotus. In her ten years with IBM, she has also been Publishing Services Manager for the Graphic Services group and Content Manager for the Lotus marketing site. She has a Bachelor's degree in Journalism and an MBA. |
| | | Stephen Londergan is the Product Marketing Manager for IBM Lotus Sametime. He has written 10 titles for the John Wiley & Sons Dummies series, including IBM Workplace Services Express for Dummies and volumes for all IBM Lotus Notes releases. You can reach Steve at stephen_londergan@us.ibm.com. |
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