SameTime Unified Telephony (SUT)

It's been a year since I last looked at SUT, and it's moved on leaps and bounds since then (it's actually a product rather than flash mock-ups!)

For those that don't know, SUT is the main Lotus play for the telephony integration which sits on top of SameTime, the Lotus Unified Communications platform.

The main idea behind SUT is that the user controls how they want to be contacted (Softphone, Deskphone, Cellphone, Voicemail etc) along with 'rules' for how to route their calls depending on things like their online status, location, time of day etc. What this means in practice is that you don't need to 'guess' where the person is or worry about calling them at an inconvenient time. It's all integrated right into the SameTime client, which then includes additional rich presence (i.e. it shows you whether I am currently on a call)

The product is now up and running, and while there are still some issues to work out with the network vendors around billing and call control, the product direction is now very focussed and it's looking really slick. It is clearly targetted purely at large enterprises, and I'll be talking with Steve next week to see how we can lay our hands on some early kit!