IBM Sametime has been a integrated part of Notes for a long time, but have been greatly improved in the latest releases 8+. Today SameTime offers instant messaging, presence awareness, web conference, support for Mobile devices, VOIP, video, phone integrations and more.

SameTime comes as a integrated part of Notes, as a separate client or as a web client. The integrated SameTime client can be accessed through the Notes clients sidebar and gives the possibility to list SameTime groups from several SameTime communities (depending on license model).

SameTime in Sidebar

The presence awareness is very cool and gives you information of identified persons SameTime status. This awareness can be found out of the box in

• Inbox and emails
• Contacts
• Calendar views and calendar entries
• To-dos
• Custom build solutions. Easily implemented by developers.

Inbox SameTime awareness

Above you see the awareness from my inbox. One of my colleagues has the “Do not disturb” sign on and the other is “Online” / “Available”. If I need to chat with one of them, i can simply right click that persons name and choose the name on the context menu, to get the SameTime menu and choose Chat.

SameTime context menu

If I’m in the mail and need to chat with the person, i can simply right click the person’s name and choose Chat as well or choose the Chat menu form the menu bar.

SameTime inside mail

SameTime mail menu

All sameTime conversations can be saved and as default SameTime history is saved as .txt files in your personal user folder. If you prefer you can change this to be saved in your mailbox and by that get the advantage of replication and the ability to see the history as Notes documents.

SameTime chat history

Introduced: Version 8.0 as sidebar application, was first introduced back in the late 90′s.