HCL Sametime (formerly from IBM)

HCL Sametime is an instant messenger used in our environment. It has various features like instant meetings & persistent chat, Multiple screen-share, Video meeting options, audio, and video calls.

You can also record the meetings for further usage. This can be deployed flexibly: it can be on-prem, cloud or hybrid which gives the users an option to choose it according to their usage. If it's a small deployment customer can go for cloud deployment where servers are managed by HCL and don't require and extra hardware.

The use of HCL Sametime helps the teams to communicate in a fast way, especially when you have teams located in different cities and even countries. As the product is very user-friendly to all users, we are having no trouble using it around the world, since we use it in Latin America, EMEA, and East Asia region. All teams are using Sametime to communicate efficiently and with no limits.

HCL Sametime is used across in my company for internal communication. Sametime is integrated with HCL Notes. We use Sametime to facilitate communications with other offices across regions without the need to send emails all the time. We also use Sametime to have a quick internal team meeting for project discussion and status updates.

IBM Sametime is being used globally in almost all departments from down to top in our company. We use it as a instant messenger to communicate with internal staff only in our day to day work. It is not the only instant messenger tool in our company but the most widely used one for sure.

IBM Sametime is the messaging app that many people at our company use on a daily basis. Not all departments use Sametime, but the ones that do, love it for regular communication between team members. It is not well suited for some of our other teams though so there is competition between Sametime, Slack, Google Hangouts and Skype.

Sametime is used across the entire organization as our instant messaging tool which comes as a part of IBM Notes (e-mail platform). It's used to quickly message a coworker if you want to talk, remind them to jump in a meeting, ask a quick question, or send a file over to someone. It helps with productivity, collaboration, and communication. It's really critical to have an effective instant messaging tool because a lot of our employees work from home and need to be able to message other workers to get quick answers or communicate effectively when working on the same project.

Sametime comes in many flavors - anything from simple chat and awareness all the way to full audio/video integration. For many IBM customers it might actually be a free entitlement (e.g. IBM Domino clients can get chat/awareness for free). Many of my clients use it as their main instant messaging platform as it integrates well with email and websites/web-based programs. It can also integrate with telephony systems and has a free mobile iOS and Android client.

Currently, due to the nature of our being a small company, our organization does not use Sametime for internal communication purposes. We do, however, recommend, install, and maintain Sametime for many of our customers. Generally we see that Sametime is used across entire organizations and often certain departments will use it differently than other departments. Sametime can address many business problems depending on how many Sametime options are deployed - it can serve the purpose of just IM, persistent chat rooms, meetings, and/or VOIP.

IBM Sametime is a collection of real-time collaboration and communication tools. It solves several problems and fills various needs across our entire organization, which I'll summarize as bullet points.

We have not yet integrated IBM Sametime with our phone system.

First, a list of the features we use which may or may not be unique to IBM Sametime:

• Presence Awareness: Quickly find someone who's available to help.
• Chat: For quick questions, notifications, or file transfers, Chat is the go-to communication tool.
• Web Meetings: For formal training, with people on-site or anywhere in the world.
• Screen-Sharing: For cross-training, technical support, or co-creating content.
  
• Audio & Video Conferencing: We've just started using this feature but we've got great feedback from traveling Sales and internals alike.
  
• Mobile Apps: From an iOS device I can join or start a web meeting, see who's available for a chat, and make or take video calls.

Additional benefits we've found:

• Savvy users log into a IBM Sametime Web Meeting to give a presentation, rather than search through thousands of files on a shared drive before a meeting.
• If on-site with a customer, our sales person can get onto IBM Sametime via the mobile app and get quick responses to time-sensitive questions.
  
• Chat on iOS can optionally show a logged-on user's GPS location (town & state). This has been really handy on multiple occasions and does not seem to impact the iOS device's battery life very much.
• File transfer is faster via IBM Sametime than via email. Users love that!

Here are some specific aspects of Sametime that we really appreciate:

• Integration with IBM Notes: Not just an add-on, but full integration means it's really quick and easy to book a web meeting with dozens of other people, or see if the person who just sent you an email is available to chat about it. Your chat status changes to "in a meeting" automatically if you've got something booked on your calendar.
• We use Notes' SmartUpgrade feature to deploy updates to the embedded IBM Sametime components of Notes along with Notes FixPacks.
  

• Centralized Settings / Preferences Management: It's an XML file, yes, but the amount of stuff we can tweak is extremely useful. This reduces the learning curve for users and keeps them from changing the wrong settings.
  
• Rest API lets our developers easily integrate basic chat functionality into web apps, etc.