Carl Tyler's Blog

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Instant Technologies today announces Version 2 of the award winning Instant TeamMessenger. Version 2 was built around the many customer requests we got, and builds a very feature rich solution for integrating Microsoft Outlook with Lotus Sametime. Some of the features the product offers are:

• Make Outlook emails, contacts, and calendar appointments dynamic with Lotus Sametime awareness
• Archives your encrypted Instant Messaging conversations directly into the Microsoft Outlook Journal
• Instantly initiate one-on-one or multiple person chats based on your selected document within Outlook
• Instant Meeting Support
• Manage IM Status with your Outlook Calendar
• Support for your existing Sametime Buddy list

Later this year Microsoft will release the Office Real-Time Collaboration server, and it still wont offer the awareness and features we offer today with IBM Lotus Instant Messaging. For example, Outlook 2003 will only offer awareness for the person that sent you the e-mail, plus a key thing is, it only works with Outlook 2003, whereas our product works with Outlook 2000 and later.

We're pretty proud of this product and some of the advancements it's making in the integration of presence into peoples day to day applications. I think we're the first company that actually offers the ability for you to manage your Sametime Status and description via the Outlook Calendar, what does this mean? Well we offer an option where you can allow our product to change your status and description based upon entries in your calendar, so for example if I have a meeting at 10 am, that has the subject "Meeting with Bill", then when 10 am rolls along, my Sametime status description will automatically change to "Meeting with Bill" and my state will change to whatever is set in the TeamMessenger preferences.

This was a tough release, we found some "issues" with the Sametime toolkits, where they didn't work as documented, or in some cases had a cool feature where they would actually crash the application. Fortunately these issues were finally addressed in later toolkit builds from Israel, but it took a long time to get them. I think the Sametime group is heavily overloaded right now, I hope IBM doesn't burn them all out, as this will not be good for anyone. If IBM wants to continue making Sametime a success, then they should really consider putting a few more people into development and marketing, as to anyone that works with this group closely can easily see they have way too much work to do.

You can read more at our main site www.instant-tech.com