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IBM Brings IM Together
An anonymous reader writes "At their Lotusphere conference, IBM announced IM interoperability with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo!, and Google Talk, to be shipped in the next release of its Sametime enterprise IM/web conferencing product in mid-2006." The omission of Microsoft's instant messenger seemed to raise quite a few questions, however.
Sametime is actually a fairly nifty little app. It's got far better integration with notes than - say messenger does with Outlook. The ability to important groups from your address book, open a chat based on an email, schedule a web based conferenced, program bots to interface with a Lotus Notes database, etc is fairly cool.
The old version always supported an OSCAR gateway, but it's nice to have it "fully" compatible without a whole lotta effort.
Let see, we already have all this with Trillian and Adium. Why do I need IBM doing it?
Because, as nice as those applications are, they require you to have separate accounts. is proposing an IM interopability gateway for Sametime - so you won't need a AIM or Yahoo account to talk to someone on their networks.
Programs like Trillian and GAIM are handy and work fairly well, but if you want to have your IM set up in more than one place (say at home, at work and at school), you have to set up every account you have in each location.
A much better solution is Jabber with transports. My AIM and MSN settings and buddylists are saved on the Jabber server, and all I have to do is login to my Jabber account. Considering the multitude of Jabber clients available (open protocol for the win!), this is a much easier system for those of us who regularly use computers in more than one location.
Because this is a corporate suite that also allows you to gather your co-workers together locally, without them needing to be on any other IM service. and for the record, having used this at IBM, I can tell you that you DO need accounts for all of the other services.. and, actually, MSN integration is in at IBM, it's just not going out on production for licensing reasons.
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There is a myriad of SameTime Clients for Linux: ICT, Sanity, SameTime (on Wine), Meanwhile plugin for GAIM, SameTime plugin for workplace....