New Zealand's move towards becoming an export-led player in the global economy means more kiwi businesses are opening overseas offices.

At the same time, many multinationals have a small team in New Zealand that needs to stay "in the loop" with head office and other regional bases.

For most businesses, communication is key, and real-time information sharing is becoming an entry-level requirement, not an added extra.

IBM's Lotus Sametime 7.5 enables businesses to seamlessly communicate across global borders. Lotus is better known as an email system, but Sametime expands the offering to include instant messaging, web conferencing, collaboration tools and what IBM calls presence awareness.

Presence awareness means a team member can instantly see if a colleague is available. This means immediate answers when they're needed, rather than lengthy, potentially costly delays waiting for responses to emails and voicemails.

Real-time turnaround
Using email alone for team collaboration is less than productive as the lag effect means progress is not made in real-time.  Online IP-based systems such as Sametime speed up the time required for important decision-making by bringing experts and information together - spontaneously or in a structured fashion.

Lotus Sametime enables those in distributed offices, companies, universities, cities or countries wanting to work on a project, order or document to connect with each other at any time, and share documents and information online. Whiteboard and presentation sharing are also facilitated. Users will be able to find answers quickly, and meetings no longer need to involve costly transportation.

Contacting other team members is done with one click, either within the Sametime window, or from the Lotus notes email interface. Users can choose between instant messaging, audio calling - via landline, mobile phone or built-in VoIP - or web conferencing (see figure 1 below).

December 2006

At a corporate level, Lotus Sametime offers a lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) because it combines the possibilities of several communication applications into one single product. It also integrates with companies' infrastructures and web applications, including Microsoft Outlook.

Users can integrate other programs - including calendar access, persistent chat rooms and access to other enterprise systems - into the Sametime environment.

The program also takes advantage of the social networking trend sweeping the internet and puts it to use in the workplace - users can make use of Sametime to find subject experts within their organisation, participate in discussion forums and run instant polls.

Lotus Sametime 7.5 represents a major upgrade in instant messaging and web conferencing, including closer integration with desktop applications and mobile instant messaging clients.

The chat window is designed to let users focus on the meeting, rather than the tools used to hold the meeting. A real-time spell check and rich fonts go some way to ensuring staff communicate clearly, while time stamps and an automatically saved chat history makes sure creative gems cooked up in mid-conversation aren't lost (see figure 2 below).

Lotus Sametime was also designed with balance in mind. Being constantly interrupted does nothing for productivity, which is why this program includes privacy enhancements and do not disturb settings. Plus, a user's status changes automatically when they join a web conference.

Click-to-call capabilities mean a team member can instantly place a telephone call to an instant messaging or mail contact while remaining in their inbox or instant messaging client.

An innovative part of Lotus Sametime is the ability to find out where on earth the other party is. A Google Earth plug in even allows you to pinpoint their location on a map or a satellite picture (see figure 3 below).

While multi-party instant messaging is commonplace, Lotus Sametime enables multi-party conferences over VoIP with other Sametime users.

Sametime is not just helping internal teams within organisations. It's designed to facilitate communications across the widest range, including Mac and Linux users, and with a wide variety of mobile phone operating systems and devices. Whether team members are within an organisation's network or outside of it, web conferencing is designed to launch quickly and easily. Sametime 7.5 provides specific indication of meeting entry progress to remove sources of confusion, as well as an auto-reconnect capability in the case of disconnection during the meeting.

All in all, this solution keeps Lotus Notes at the top of the class in terms of collaboration and communications tools.

For more information, contact
Gary Elmes, IBM
09 3592679
locutus@nz.ibm.com