IBM Lotus Sametime

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Lotus Sametime is an enterprise instant messaging and web conferencing application sold by the Lotus Software division of IBM. Lotus Sametime provides enterprise instant messaging functionality, presence information, and web conferencing. It offers strong support for communications standards and standard protocols, including Session Initiation Protocol, SIMPLE, T.120 and H.323. Lotus Sametime also integrates with Lotus Notes.

The product was originally the synthesis of technologies IBM acquired from two companies: the first, an American company called Databeam, provided the architecture to host T.120 dataconferencing (for web messaging) and H.323 Multi-Media Conferencing; the second was Ubique, an Israeli company whose software technology provided the "presence awareness" functionality that allows users to detect which of their peers are online and available for conferencing.

Lotus Sametime client software is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux, with Macintosh support expected in 2007. (Sametime Connect, NotesBuddy) though there are Sametime compatible clients for other OSes based on the meanwhile library (Adium, Gaim, Kopete, Proteus) as well as clients with native Sametime support (Gaim as of version 2.0, Mercury). The Lotus Sametime server supports a variety of operating systems as well.

The current version of this program is Lotus Sametime 7.5. It is described in detail on the IBM product homepage. One of the new features is the Lotus Sametime Gateway, which adds support for communication with users of AOL, Yahoo and Google Talk. Because Google Talk uses the XMPP protocol, Sametime can interact with XMPP tools such as Jabber. However, Google Talk is the only XMPP system that the Sametime Gateway officially supports at the moment.

With Sametime 7.5 IBM has introduced chat archiving facility up to 270 days. This was one area where Sametime was found lacking in the previous versions. Zap Notes & Notes Buddy will continue to provide interfaces to the new version, but with archiving Sametime has almost equalled its plug-ins.