Lotus Preps Sametime QuickPlace, Domino Updates

The new version of Sametime, which the company bills as an enterprise-class secure instant messaging product, will let solution providers and others more easily interact with multiple workgroups or buddy lists, channel sources said.

The release, due to ship by the end of this month, will log users into both AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and Sametime simultaneously, unless one or both of those log-ons is turned off, according to Lotus documents examined by CRN. In addition, the server can now capture and transmit video from a 360-degree camera to online meetings, the documents said.

That video capability is particularly attractive to Andy Sweet, CTO of Perficient, an Austin, Texas-based IBM solution provider. "We use Sametime all the time instead of WebEx to save money on travel. We've done some mergers and not everyone has seen each other yet, so video would be helpful," he said.

Other new perks include updated alerting to flag users when a buddy comes online--something AIM already offers--and the ability to blast fast announcements to one or more buddies, according to Lotus documents. The product is due to ship at the end of the month, said solution providers familiar with the product.

New online status icons will show which users are on cell phones or pagers as opposed to their computers--another feature already incorporated by AIM. New icons show if users are offline, don't want to be disturbed, away, active or mobile, for example.

AOL and IBM have long facilitated interoperability between their respective offerings. AOL has not been as accommodating when it comes to Yahoo and Microsoft instant messaging services.

"We use instant messaging more and more. And the fact that Lotus is the only enterprise client that integrates with AIM is big," said one solution provider who requested anonymity. "The Microsoft realtime server, which is in flux now, integrates with Microsoft Messenger, but AOL still has the bulk of the market," he said.

Sametime 3.0 also beefs up other meeting capabilities. A moderator can now put files onto a shared whiteboard at any time, for example. And users can now schedule or attend meetings from the Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes client, according to the documents.

IBM should know about instant messaging. More than 200,000 of its employees are IM users, the company has said.

Lotus is expected to detail these new products Oct. 1 at a briefing here hosted by General Manager Al Zollar.

The company has talked up at least some parts of Domino 6--with server-side spam control and integrated support for mobile devices--for more than a year. Solution providers expect it to finally ship on or around the Oct. 1 date.

It is still unclear, however, how Lotus will package and price J2EE support within Domino. Last January, the company cancelled internally developed J2EE support and said it would furnish comparable capability from IBM's WebSphere product, but refused to comment about how that will be handled.

The latest revision of QuickPlace, software that enables teams to set up secure online collaborative workspaces, adds new Web caching technology for improved page-rendering performance, according to other Lotus documents.

A new "My Places" feature lists all of a user's workspaces across multiple servers. The bookmarkable spot also shows the title of the space, its size and when it was last changed. This offering also bolsters its instant messaging capability with a built-in subset of Sametime, according to the documents.

Enhanced search capabilities will let users search their multiple workspaces. The current version would search only the active workspace or a particular folder.

Lotus did not return calls for comment.