Carl Tyler's Blog

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take gun and shoot foot being sure to use a bullet powerful enough to go through foot and hit partner. Having worked at IBM/Lotus for many many years, I know it's a big place ruled by process, but sometimes just sometimes you hope that someone there will have the power to fix things quickly and get people motivated behind a cause to change things. This is one of those things that the Lotus division should get fixed!

Yesterday I was on the Lotus website and clicked on the "What We Sell" link, being an advocate of the power of Instant Messaging in the sales and customer support arena, I was very pleased to see a Chat online button.

There I was thinking woo hoo, IBM is finally eating it's own dog food and using Lotus Instant Messaging to provide interactive help for customers. How disappointed I was to find out that when I clicked the link it installed an "Avaya" applet with Avaya back-end technology.

I built a customer solution 3+ years ago on Sametime (some screenshots here), so why can't IBM manage it?

I decided to ask the person on the other end why, and you can see the response on the right.

Now I would never suggest that everyone go to that page and ask the specialists the same question, as I know what a burden that can be on support folks. But if a few people did go and ask the question, maybe, just maybe it would help IBM get a better answer.

The most upsetting thing about this is for partners that sell solutions that do exactly this type of Sametime Customer Support application, because when customers start looking for solutions, they go to the IBM website and go hhm, IBM doesn't use Sametime so perhaps it's not good for this type of application, which everyone that knows Sametime knows is complete BS.

I am pretty sure, if IBM found Microsoft using a solution on their website to build customer support from another vendor and didn't use a Microsoft product, it would be mentioned in competitive pitches.