Sametime moved ahead in leaps and bounds in 2006 and it is good to see this is going to continue in 2007. I know that our organisation is leveraging Sametime 7.5 in many ways and it has now become a core part of our everyday toolset. Some neat new features coming on Sametime 7.5.1 announced at Lotusphere:
- Tabbed Chats - How many time do you have 3-4 open chat sessions on the fly. Starts to crowd your screen eh! Well Sametime 7.5.1 has the answer. Tabbed Chats. As you can see from the screenshot you can now consolidate all chat sessions into once window with a convenient photo of each person. Or if you don't use photos it just lists the people on each tab. I will be interested to see how it managed 3+way chat sessions but I think it is a great idea.
- Peer to Peer Video - With Sametime 7.5 we had voice capabilities. Well now there is also Peer to Peer video. There was a great demo of this in the Lotusphere Opening General Session that showed you can have videos of 2 or more people in the conference as well as videos of devices on the network. It just groups the video images at the bottom of the Sametime client. Neat!
- Integration with 3rd party vendors - There were a number of 3rd party integrations show such as integration with Cisco kit where you can instantiate phone calls direct from the Sametime client. While we don't have this kind of back end equipment in place I am sure this will be great for large enterprises.