HCL Sametime vs. Sangoma Asterisk

Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.

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Digium Asterisk is well suited for a city government as a communications solution for internal and external use. Other options like PBX are more expensive and hard to escalate. VoIP makes it easier to use the communications infrastructure instead that already exists rather than having to wire every phone when the solution is a digital or analog phone. In my city, government offices are not in the same place, which makes it harder to communicate everything together.

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• Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen.
• Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well.
• IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly.
• No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period.

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• Easy communication and configuration with many soft phone and hard phone models
• A great community that helps the software have more and more functionality

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• Not convenient for a large group meeting.
• Very basic tool for internal communication only not available for third party communication
• Very basic and limited mobile app features.
• High speed connection is needed to connect to Sametime

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• Transferring to a Voicemail is particularly hard to do, and calls tend to drop when transferring.
• I would like a different interface; the current one feels clumsy
• Over the weekend, it logs you out, and you have to remember your password or reset it to gain access.

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Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.

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Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.

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User friendly. Very little training to use it

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Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.

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Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish

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I have not needed to use the Sametime support team. Our local support team was able to configure it for me.

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I have asked in the not so recent past about having my phone updated with my saved Digium "favorites" list but it doesn't seem that this is possible

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We use Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, but Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while Jabber is used for call.

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Recently I've been using Vonage Business, and while it is far more expensive and a lot less configurable than Digium, the mobility is essential for my new role. Digium is ideal for a business with both a very technical staff and a user base that is not remote. Digium was selected due to price and ability to create custom applications.

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Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.

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• Sametime keeps many of our team members in contact throughout the day which leads to increased productivity which makes everyone happy.
• We use the team chat room feature every day. This allows a team to stay focused on the task without any extra messages that are not on topic.
• The split between IBM Sametime, Slack and Google Hangouts has caused some issues when team members are not checking for messages on a certain app.

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• being zero cost, we saved at least 3 million on what a legacy pbx would have cost
• the savings and speed means lower cost on our service making us more competitive
• stability

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info