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IBM Brings IM Together

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the working-together-against-corporate-religion dept.

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.

5 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Sametime by ender81b · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Already here by ericdano · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let see, we already have all this with Trillian and Adium. Why do I need IBM doing it?

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    1. Re:Already here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Already here by Otter · · Score: 3, Funny
      The point of SameTime that the summary glossed over is that it's an IM component of Lotus Notes, and is integrated with the rest of the Notes environment. Also, it's a desktop sharing tool (like WebEx). Obviously this wouldn't be news if it were just a cross-network IM client.

      SameTime is easily the nicest component in the Notes suite, although anything that doesn't make you want to smash your skull through the monitor would qualify for that honor.

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  3. ICT? by darkmayo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sounds like the inhouse app that IBM people made "IBM Community Tools", Sametime backend with MSN, Yahoo, AOL functionality along with tons of really cool stuff and community building. (Skilltap for the win)

    Bit of a resource hog but it is pretty nice.

    If they are releasing this for public consumption I think it would be a good idea.

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