Carl Tyler's Blog :: Do you find all the Sametime products confusing?

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Something that has come up quite a bit in discussion lately is all the different Sameitme offerings. One thing I keep hearing is customers aren't sure which version they're entitled too, why they have some many versions etc.

You can now get the following Sametime versions:

Lotus Sametime Advanced
Lotus Sametime Advanced software includes all of the capabilities of Sametime Standard software but combined with new collaborative capabilities such as persistent group chat, instant screen sharing plus knowledge search and retrieval tools. Advanced helps make it easy to find info, share expertise, engage in ongoing conversations, instantly share your desktop and automatically store and reuse location information. You can see more about Sametime Advanced here

Lotus Sametime Standard
This is a market-leading platform for UC². I it offers integrated, enterprise instant messaging, VoIP, video chats, and Web conferencing capabilities with the security features required for business use. Lotus Sametime Standard is the upgrade/entitlement path for customers who are entitled for previous releases of Lotus Sametime. You can see more about Sametime Standard here

Lotus Sametime Entry
Offers encrypted, authenticated, scalable, and proven enterprise instant messaging capabilities. Entry is designed for companies looking to get started with enterprise instant messaging at an affordable price. You can see more about it here

Lotus Sametime Unyte
A hosted voice, video and web conferencing service. Its quick to acquire and very simple to use. You can see more about Unyte here

Lotus Sametime Limited Use Entitlement
If you already have a valid licence for Lotus Notes & Domino 6.5.1 or higher it entitles you to free use of the excellent presence awareness and instant chat in your Notes Client. You see roe about Entitlement here

Sametime Mobile
IBM Lotus Sametime Mobile now supports more devices on their client platforms - including Windows Mobile 6 Standard and Professional, RIM BlackBerry 8300, Sony Ericsson P1. Sametime Instant Messaging is a great tool for handhelds and mobiles such as the BlackBerry. You can use your handheld or mobile to instantly see who is available and chat "live" wherever you are. You can read more about Mobile here

Lotus Sametime Trial
A downloadable trial version

And soon we'll also have.

Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony
Designed to make it easy to access and manage your telephone communications from inside your Lotus Sametime or the Lotus Notes client. Its planned to extend the value of Lotus Sametime and your existing telephony investments. Sametime UT will be available later this year.

Now as someone that offers Sametime consulting this is good news, as people need help and advice figuring it all out. However I think it would be better if companies could be focused on deploying the solution than trying to figure out which one they are entitled to or want. I do Sametime day in day out, and even I have to keep referring back to my notes, how the hell does a typical IBM sales guy know what version they are talking about, or do they always talk and demo Sametime Blue? So dear Sametime customers/partners, are you feeling the confusion? Do you know what you're entitled to? How would you prefer IBM to market these products?

For partners, how do you decide which Sametime to develop for, do you go develop for advanced and assume all advanced features are available, or do you develop for the lowest common denominator?

Comments

1 - I had to read your blog backwards to understand the differences between the versions, and its still fuzzy. They need to publish a chart I think. No doubt IBM will eventually understand that simplicity sells and they'll collapse the product offerings into less levels.
I recommend that for the telephony features they just call that aspect an add-in pay-for option rather than have a separate product level.

Posted by Roland Reddekop At 01:34:18 PM On 04/02/2008 | - Website - |

2 - This mess reflect the different teams working on sametime at IBM. Advanced is the work of Fernando Salazar "ESuite/Workplace guy" who knows nothing about Notes or Sametime so he decides to use Websphere/DB2 for chat presistence instead of Domino. Mobile product is done at Austin by someone outside the Sametime organization. Sametime Entry was my idea because a lot of users were complainning about the size of the client and figured will disable features they don't use. I wanted it to do at install time not as a seperate product but this is IBM.

Posted by Wassim At 10:27:06 PM On 04/02/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Thanks,
I'll refer to this post next time I am 'forced'into a Microsoft 'moving parts discussion Emoticon

Posted by Peter de Haas At 05:56:51 AM On 04/03/2008 | - Website - |

4 - In my opinion, the product should only have three offerings: one for IM only that comes with the Notes CAL, another with everything that Sametime is today (7.x), and a final third covering everything else (namely the telephony stuff). Most companies would fall into one of those three buckets.

Posted by Jamie Jenkins At 12:50:12 PM On 04/03/2008 | - Website - |