Sametime Entry/Standard/Advanced: - thumbnail descriptions of the differences

Anthony Holmes  23 May 2008 04:48:57 PM

I had a meeting with a customer today to discuss a Sametime project.

It became apparent that the different levels of Sametime were causing a bit of confusion. It wasn't immediately obvious which features came with which levels.  

IBM either describes the levels with a high level diagram, or with long lists of capabilities. And that makes it easy to get confused.

I'm going to try to give a thumbnail description of how the three editions of Sametime (and two or three side bars) relate to each other that may make it simpler to have a more intuitive understanding of the different levels.

Here's the picture:


The three editions of Sametime:  Thumbnail sketches

Sametime Entry

You want awareness and the ability to start chat messages. When you see a name in your buddy list or email client (Notes or Outlook), you want to be able to start a chat with them. That's Sametime Entry.

(If you've already got Notes licences, you're entitled to use Sametime entry features from within the Notes client for no extra cost. If not, you buy Sametime Entry and run the Sametime Entry Connect client).

Sametime Standard

Chat and presence are good and useful, but there are whole collection of other ways you want to interact. You want to start a meeting and share a presentation or a screen.  You want audio or video over your computer network. You'd like to be able to chat on your mobile device. Maybe you want to set up a gateway that allows you to chat with people in other companies or with public Instant Messaging environments like Yahoo or Google Talk. You probably want to think about extending awareness so that whenever you read a name on any of your web servers (no matter whose technology they run on), you can start a chat with that person.

If you want some or all of these features, you want Sametime Standard.

Sametime Advanced

You've really bought into the value of Instant Messaging as a tool. Email's great, but there is a whole range of knowledge flowing about your organisation with Sametime. People are sharing experience and knowledge and working a lot more efficiently. (Or that's what you'd like!) Now you want to set up Instant Chat 'rooms' where people can drop in and out to discuss topics. Just like a water cooler, except people drop in and out from anywhere in the world at any time and see what happened whilst they were away.

You want people to be able to pose questions to groups of experts. The right person answers the question in an instant. You want to save those gems of wisdom in a repository that others can find and use. Also, you'd like some neater ways of collaborating on files and working out where people are.

You want Sametime Advanced.


Extensions to Sametime

Unified Telephony

After a while, your fingers get tired typing away in chat windows. You find talking into your computer's microphone OK, and you wear earphones to save your workmates from your calls over the network. But you've got an exciting new VIOP phone system, and you'd like to to do a little more than your old PABX. When Sametime's presence awareness shows you that your colleague across the world has just returned to their desk, you'd like to click a button that starts a phone call between the two of you using your VOIP handset. You'd like to start a conference call with your team. You'd like to run a meeting in the meeting room with the fancy new AV camera, and let people in remote sites see you.

To do this, you make use of the Unified Telephony (Unified Communications & Collaboration features) that exist between Sametime and virtually every telephony system on the planet.

Externally hosted Web Conferences

Note my use of the term "Web Conferences" here rather than "Web Meetings".

If you want to run web based conferences without the hassle of setting up infrastructure to provide it - perhaps with customers as well as internal staff, then you want Sametme Unyte.

Plug-ins

Finally, don't feel limited by the feature set provided in the three Sametime Editions and two Extensions described above. You can obtain (either for free or for a price) extensions to the feature set of Sametime, or write your own Plug-ins to extend the product. Have a look at the Sametime Catalog for some of them.



And a final disclaimer...

I'm not in IBM marketing, and these pages don't represent an official statement of features or entitlement. For up to date information see the Sametime web site. Try it out at the Lotus Greenhouse.

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