IBM adds mobile, Office XP integration features to Sametime 7.5

Computerworld - Just months before releasing Version 7.5 of its Sametime collaboration suite, IBM has unveiled late-breaking plans to add features, including integration with Microsoft Office XP and connectivity capabilities for a wide range of mobile devices.

In an announcement Monday, IBM said that the move is designed to counter Microsoft Corp.'s efforts in the same market and to allow corporate users to stay with open-standards compatibility instead of Microsoft's soup-to-nuts approach.

The IBM announcement came on the same day Microsoft spelled out its unified communications product road map, which includes voice, video and messaging capabilities expected to ship next year (see "Microsoft details unified communications road map"). Among the products expected in the second quarter of 2007 is Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft's redubbed Live Communications Server. It will include voice-over-IP (VoIP) call management, as well as audio, video, and webconferencing and instant messaging (IM) communication across a variety of devices and applications.

David Marshak, senior product manager for Real Time Collaboration products at IBM's Lotus Software division, said the updates to Sametime 7.5 are aimed at showing customers the different approaches between the two companies.

"Microsoft made some big announcements about what they're doing next year," Marshak said. "We're announcing what we're doing this year," Marshak said. "To us, it's sort of a natural extension of our open platform announcements from earlier this year." He was referring to IBM's Lotusphere conference in January, where the new features in Sametime 7.5 and the product's new Eclipse-based open-standards framework strategy were unveiled, he said.

Sametime 7.5 is slated for release in the third quarter of this year. The added features include integration with Microsoft Outlook 2000, Office XP and SharePoint applications so that Sametime 7.5 features such as sending an IM, making a call, sharing an application or launching a webconference can be done while a user is working in a Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In Outlook's e-mail in-boxes, users will be able to view online presence information, schedule webconferences from their calendars and access full Sametime capabilities with one mouse click. The integration features are expected to be released for Sametime at the beginning of 2007.

IBM also will offer direct connectivity to Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and Nokia Corp.'s mobile devices, as well as to mobile devices running Microsoft Windows Mobile operating systems. Business users will be able to access Sametime presence features to see who is available and where they are located, enabling communication through instant messages and voice chats directly from mobile devices. The mobile support will be ready by the end of this year, according to IBM.