Carl Tyler's Blog

1 - We actually had a lot of discussion with LIVEPerson and the internal IBM teams on this (and it's one of the reasons we're one of the last brands to start using the service).

The piece that isn't obvious from just browsing the Sametime website is that LIVEPerson doesn't only provide a way for a website visitor to start a chat through a browser. They're actually providing back-end tracking and monitoring so they can determine when an IBM representative should pro-actively initiate a chat session with a website visitor, along with a whole host of backend reporting and statistics on the conversations and visits. (And it's this capability - to pro-actively initiate sessions with website visitors - that sold IBM on this package.)

Back to the bigger question, though... could something like this be built on Sametime? I have no doubt. When IBM first started investigating this a few years ago do I wish they had spent time looking at whether it made sense to engage with IBM Business Partners to see if they could provide similar capabilities? Absolutely.

(And just because it's being done this way today, it doesn't mean that it always will be done this way....)

2 - Speachless.

3 - very disappointing. Surely there are enough talented people within IBM and the business partner community to build the same functionality - whoever decided LIVEPerson was the best for IBM as a whole isn't really playing the team game.

4 - @1 - Adam, he can correct me if my memory is wrong but I believe the owner of this site showed me this exact feature using Sametime 3.x at least 3 years ago. Carl is that correct ??

Neil.

5 - @4 You are right Neil, I spoke to Adam off-line about this.