IBM Sametime design

 We've got some very exciting news on the mobile front!  Sametime 8.5.2 is now available on the Google Android mobile device!  That means you can now have many of the features that you've come to know and expect from Sametime on your desktop or laptop computer on your Android. This includes:

• Using Sametime awareness and chat features.
  
• Tapping and holding a contact or group name to display a list of options.
  
• Adding and removing contacts and groups to and from your contact list.
  
• Reviewing mobile chat histories.
  
• Sending telephone camera photos through Sametime chats.

And, if you have Samtime Unified Telephony on your device, you can place Sametime calls to contacts or people you find using the Sametime search. You can also change your preferred Sametime device to route calls to other devices.

In Sametime 8.5.2, there are a number of new server configuration settings that you can use to control your deployment:

Whether managed access is required:

meeting.managedAccess.override (default: 0 or off)

How long people are locked out of rooms after ejection:

rtc4web.ejectionTimeout (default: 300 seconds)

Whether meeting rooms will open in a new window or tab:

meetingroomcenter.openRoomInNewWindow (default: true)

Multiple protocol proxy confirmation:

meetingroomcenter.stProxySSLAddress

Whether guests can join meetings on this server:

meetingroom.allowGuestAccess (default: 1 or true)

In addition, there are two new user policies:

• Allow Meeting Room Polls (default: enabled)

• Allow Annotations of Uploaded Content (default: enabled)

For Sametime 8.5.2, we've changed the default for launching instant meetings, to make it even faster for you to access meetings when you need to.

Now, in preferences, the default setting for whether to open a dialog when you click to start an instant meeting is OFF:

 Starting in 8.5.2, you can choose different alerting options for new chats and responses to existing chats:


You can use this feature to help you differentiate between new conversations and responses to ongoing conversations.

Some great new features are in place for chat history in Sametime 8.5.2:

• View all chats in the order they've been received
  
• Files and links are pulled into their own tab, for easy tracking
• When searching in chat history, restrict your search to entries from a single person

Here are some pictures to illustrate these features:



In addition, system administrators can turn off presence in the chat history window, with this preference (set in plugin_customization.ini or the managed-settings.xml):

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.chat.logging.ui/noPersonListLiveNames=true

Sametime 8.5.2 now supports "widgets" and recognized names and numbers.  If you have this capability, this means you can hover your mouse over an underlined name or number in chat history or an open chat window - or even in IBM Notes, such as in a Notes calendar invitation - to perform additional actions on that name or number.  For example, you can click an underlined telephone number or name to select an option to start a call.

Here's how this looks in an open chat window:

 
There's more exciting mobile news with Sametime 8.5.2 and our new Sametime meetings client for the RIM Blackberry device!

Now from your Blackbery you can:

• Enter, find, and participate in Sametime meeting rooms - Select a Web address (URL) to a meeting room, for example, in an email, calendar entry, or chat, to enter the room.
  

• View shared presentation content - Select the menu button and then Zoom In or Zoom Out; use the scroll or tap and drag on touch screens the pan the presentation into view.
  

• See the meeting room participants - In the meeting room, use the menu button and select "Participants" to see a list of participants.

• View and participate in "live" meeting discussions - In the meeting room, use the menu button and select "Discussion" to see postings made to the "Discussion" area of the meeting room.
  

• Connect to the audio call and the meeting at the same time. (Available only with wifi and some carriers.) - To view the meeting room call information, on a selected meeting room in the room list or search result, or from within a meeting room, use the menu button and select "View room Information."  Then dial in to the meeting room.

Hi, I'm Lauren, the lead end-user writer for IBM Sametime. Amy and I are going to spend the next few days covering some of the cool new features in the 8.5.2 release.

Today I wanted to tell you about using audio and video in Sametime meetings that open in a web browser.

With Sametime 8.5.2, meeting rooms that open in a web browser now have many of the same audio and video features as do meeting rooms that open in a Sametime window.  This means that people who join meetings from outside your company, or people who don't have the Sametime client, can participate in audio/video calls.

If your company has these capabilities, when you are in a meeting room that opens in a web browser, you can use the call icons under the Voice and Video area of the meeting room to call in to your meeting and then perform call-related actions.

For example, here's what you might see under Voice and Video if you are the room owner or a room manager; click the Green phone icon to start the call.

And, here's what you might see after the call has started - icons to hang up the call, put the the call on mute and so much more:

Note: The specific call icons that the meeting room owner sees depends on the call capabilities you have and whether or not you are the meeting room owner.

 Wait until you see the new IBM Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) Lite Client software. SUT Lite Client is a licensing option that is available with Sametime 8.5.2.  For example, with SUT Lite Client you can:

• Make and receive telephone and video calls, even with someone who is offline.

On your Sametime contact list, right-click the name of a person you want to call – even someone who is not online -- and select Call.

You can also click a contact and then click the Call icon or in the toolbar at the top of your contact list.

• Make one-on-one or conference video calls

In the Find a person or number field at the top of the Sametime contact list, type the entire telephone number or the SIP URI of the video conferencing device you want to call. Select the number when it displays. In the open call window, click Video > Start Video.

 With Sametime 8.5.2, we've made it easy for everyone to see who is the active speaker during a call with multiple people. In the picture below, the orange frame around Amadou Alain's picture shows that currently he is the active speaker on this call:



If multiple people are talking, each speaker's image will be framed.

With Sametime 8.5.2, we've introduced a great new security feature, "managed access," that lets people join your meeting rooms only when you or a room manager is there.

You can select this option either when creating a new meeting room or by changing the room settings of an existing meeting room.

This picture shows where this setting appears when you create a new meeting room:


This same feature is available for meetings accessed from a web browser:

People who try to join your meeting when you're not there are put in a "waiting room", and they must wait until you're there before they can see any content in the room.

Use this feature whenever you don't want people in your meeting room when you're not there!

Does your company use more than one community at a time?  If so, you'll be very happy to see our updated server community icons, which can help you differentiate which users are in which communities.  Based on your feedback, we've designed these icons to have greater contrast with each other, and also rotate through them when you add communities, so that, by default, new communities will have unique icons.

The new icons look like this:

 

Starting in release 8.5.2, administrators have an easy way to delete meeting rooms that are not being used anymore.

From the web-based administrative UI in the meeting center, you'll see a Delete icon next to individual meeting rooms:

 

 

In addition, when viewing the rooms for an individual user, you can delete all that user's rooms, if you need to quickly remove a collection of rooms (e.g., if an employee leaves the company):


 

 With Sametime 8.5.2, there are some new features that will help meeting room owners and managers manage their meetings.

First, we've added a new End Meeting button in the global toolbar so that meeting room owners or managers can simply click the button to close the meeting room. This action ends the meeting for all participants, so they no longer are in the room, and no longer see any room content.  The room owner (or manager, depending on who presses the button) stays in the room, so they can be ready for their next meeting.

Here's what this new button looks like in the toolbar:


We've also added a feature that allows meeting room owners and managers to remove a participant from a meeting. From within a meeting room, a room owner or manager simply right-clicks a participant's name to remove that person from the meeting:



Users who are removed will see a notification that they've been removed, and they will no longer see the content of the meeting room.

When someone is removed from a room, there may be a "lockout" time, during which that person will not be able to re-enter the room. System administrators set this timeout period on a per-server level, using this configuration setting:

rtc4web.ejectionTimeout (default: 300 seconds)