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!

Productivity Tools for the Mobile Worker

A more detailed look today at some of the new/improved products in the mobility area.

The two most interesting products are Lotus Traveller - version 8.5 adds a lot more security features such as device wiping and device security compliance checking/enforcing, and Lotus Mobile Connect, which effectively is a native client-less VPN gateway for Lotus Notes - this is the product that enables the Ultra-Lite iNotes that is optimised for the iPhone.

What is really handy is that the products can operate in a 'proxy mode' within the DMZ (similar to our BES environment), and only the gateway servers need to be at the new version of Notes (8.5). This solution also handily delivers email to internet based users, which I vaguely recall was of interest to some of our users...

The backend email servers need to be at least up to 7.02

Finally, the last item worthy of note is the IBM Websphere Everyplace Mobile Portal (you've got to love those snappy product names), which is a bolt-on product to websphere which automatically adjusts the website to best fit your mobile device. Check out the IBM home site from different devices to see how/whether it works!

Simplifying Notes ID Management

My first session today was a (far too) detailed look at the new identity vault mechanism that will be delivered as part of Notes 8.5

The basic mechanic seems to be that all the id files are stored in an identity vault (a specialised notes database), and allows specific functionality for the user to download their id file as required.

As the id file is now accessible centrally, this enables some 'forgotten password' type functionality which sounds good, but unfortunately is not compatible with the "Notes Shared Login" which is the functionality that allows single sign-on integration with the Windows account.

Strangely enough, when people were commenting that this "didn't seem very sensible or aligned with the rest of the Lotus vision", the response was that the best solution was to integrate everything direct with Active Directory!

Ho Hum, and I had such high hopes too...