The IMLU or Sametime Limited Use it still around, allowing just the basic integrated chat features.  Follow that up with Sametime Entry which offers just the basic chat features plus a list of items:

Presence and instant messaging chat

• Integration with e-mail and productivity applications such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, and IBM Lotus Notes
• Multi-way chat
• Rich text, time stamps, spell check and emoticons
• Contact type-ahead search and contact detail display
• Local chat history
• Contact list management: Sort contact list, Show short names, Show online contacts only

Then you move on to Sametime Standard that jumps up to meetings and everything else, just like you have now.

Sametime 8 Advanced will be a bit longer, but should be worth the wait.

One of the reoccurring issues that comes up is how to pull RSS feeds into my Notes 8 client that need authentication.  By creating a HTTP document in your local address book you can pass the login.  Notice that the SSL box does disappear when you select HTTP however.  It will show for IMAP, POP and LDAP, just not HTTP.  You need to go to the Advanced tab to specify the port and certificate management options.  So, in theiory, that should do it.  NOw to do some final testing...

Adam posted a blog entry announcing that ibm.com/sametime is now live with a new look and feel.  Cool.  However, I always used http:/www.lotus.com/sametime and it seems to go to an entirely different page still.  Weird, but awesome news that Sametime makes it to the big leagues with version 8

So we started collecting comments at conferences/seminars said by both presenters and attendees.  I then forgot to post them until I added a few more in Chicago.  So while I prep for Admin 2007 Europe, read and enjoy.  While these are actual quotes, if we take them out of the context of the conversation, then it changes the whole meaning....

• They stuck lit cotton balls in my ears and up my nose.  It was the best haircut I have ever had.
• As long as it's only that thumb
• Squeeze that in my mouth and throw berries at me
• No, I went commando that night
• You can't eat these fireballs
• It's like putting suncream in your mouth

And the granddaddy winner of them all..

• I don't like anything on my butt, only in it.

From the article which I was lucky enough to be in..

IBM  is stepping up its bid to derail Microsoft  unified communications onslaught by unveiling new or enhanced versions Tuesday of its WebSphere, Rational and Tivoli products.

This is going to significantly reduce the startup and management costs for implementing unified communications with the IBM infrastructure.

In order to foster faster communication with everyone at Lotusphere, or even if you just wish to sit back and watch, there will be a Lotusphere channel you can follow and post to.  Twitter is setting it up so if you set yourself to follow all the tweets, you can also post to it so everyone gets them.  Talk about instant communication when not everyone can be on Sametime and there is breaking news, a vendor giving away cool stuff, when you want to find people or when a vendor has an open party.  The possibilities are endless.  I talked to some Loti in and around the social networking area to see if they had anything built for this, the immediate answer was they didn't think so.

I would suggest you follow me also as I have some other surprises as we take Lotusphere into a social networking exploration.

So here are the basics for all of you that are new to Twitter.

you can find me at http://twitter.com/IdoNotes

http://twitter.com/lotusphere

everyone should set Twitter to FOLLOW. You can follow any profile on Twitter by sending follow+username.  For example, people would send:

follow Lotusphere

to Twitter from IM or phone.  People can also go right to the profile page, where you can click the  "follow" button located under the profile name.

 

People who follow the profile will be added to the list of followers; if they decide to Twitter back about the event, their updates will show in the "Lotusphere" timeline.

Via phone or chat, instruct people to send FOLLOW Lotusphere to Twitter at:

• 40404 for US followers
• 21212 for Canadian followers
• +44 762 4801423 for all other international followers

You can even add Twitter to your instant messenger buddylists while there.

The final session numbers have been assigned and I waited to get those to make life easy for you to say you will be attending them!

HND302 - Setup and Administration for the IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway.   (yes this is hands-on folks)
BP105 - Installing and Administrating the IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway        (myself and Kyungae Lim of IBM)

So there you have it..  fun filled sessions all about the Sametime Gateway.

This week I am hosting the Administrating Sametime 7.5 and Deploying Plug-ins.  Post the questions fast as the holidays are fast approaching.

I found this interesting and quite amusing for some reason:

ATTENTION IBM Partners (Lotus Notes, AS400, S390, DB2, BEA, WEBSPHERE, CRM, GREAT PLAINS, EXCHANGE, SQL CUSTOMER LISTS)

I'd like to introduce our company, Repharm Technologies, to you. We are a knowledge base company, and we sell contact lists. We have a variety of lists available, from hardware, software, to technology companies, with on average 10 executive contacts per organization.

I see from your website that you are an Alliance Partner of IBM and wondered if you'd be interested in acquiring a copy of their customer list?

While I put no merit in this, they make some huge assumptions with an even funnier company name.  Repharm?  As in reputation harm?

You can find the technote right here

Content Hardware requirements
The following hardware is required for the systems that host IBM^® Lotus^® Connections services.
At least two Intel^® 64 or IA-32 based server machines
Two CPUs per server, 2.6 GHz CPU speed or higher
Minimum 4 GB of memory per machine

Plus a special note for using Lotus Domino as the directory source:

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server
IBM Lotus Domino 7.0.2 and later.
Note: Before you can use this LDAP server, you must apply fix PK52839 to WebSphere Application Server.

I found this site (called Foamee) quite funny.  It requires a Twitter account, but that is it.  From there it even has a widget to show who you owe and who owes you a beer. Good to have for Lotusphere right?

I received an enlightening email from Susan Bulloch with a link to the LDD Sandbox posting showing not only 22 ready to use components, but also some hints at what partners have up their sleeve. Check out GrapeCity for their WebCharts3d dashboard component.

I picked this up from the following blogger John Resig..

Gmail has a hidden feature: Atom feeds for Labels! The technique is simple:
1.        Setup a filter to catch all email from a specific mailing list.
2.        Apply a label to all of that mail (e.g. 'list').
3.        Access the Atom feed via this URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/list/ (changing 'list' to be the name of the label.

So if you take this and then flip it to Domino, you could create a rule to tag or sort your mail-in databases and then push this out to the feed readers with the RSS capabilities of Domino.  This would solve an alert issue for numerous people that share part in a mail-in database.  Everyone could read the stream based on what category they handle from a single course that is tagged/foldered/categorized properly like you can do already with my blog.  Go to the archives tab above and look at the different pre-categorized feeds you can get form one single database.

Same idea, just move it to other data stores in your Domino architecture.

This article on ARNnet summed it up quite nicely.

IBM: Big Blue is a "dominant player in the collaboration space" that has done well in Web 2.0 with Lotus Connections. "Based on its own experience as a power user of Social Computing, IBM developed a new ground-up offering for customers: Lotus Connections. Connections, which blends blogs, tagging, communities, profiles and task management, represents a highly integrated platform that is enterprise-ready," Forrester writes.

This is exactly what I know I have conveyed to the team there for Connections.  While they are ahead in enabling enterprises for social networking, there is so much they can include that is readily available on the consumer side to draw the people into seeing not only the business nees but  growing the demand and usage.
From the same article:

IBM, Microsoft and SAP are taking a charge at the business Web 2.0 market, but the big vendors still lag behind smaller rivals who have developed far more innovative technology with quicker release cycles, according to a Forrester analyst.
"Right now I'm seeing a clear preference toward smaller vendors," says Rob Koplowitz, an analyst at Forrester. "Generally speaking the big vendors are playing catch up and the big vendors have a deployment model that is not very attractive."

I am not quite where to begin with this one. It is labeled as Office Accessories from a Parallel Universe. It is exactly that. Eccentric Cubicle brings it all to a parallel universe for sure!

This is way beyond what any of us would ever build for our desk. My favorite was the Projectile-2-Peer Intercubicle Messaging device. Which in reality was a well defined, through tool tap and die skills, missile launcher for your desk. The idea was to attach your message or put inside a rocket and shoot it to your neighbor. Much like the good old days. But the skills it took to build it were out of this world too.

Let me say the author, Kaden Harris, was fun to read though. His commentary for each project made the text portion enjoyable. Now there is not a lot of text overall in the grand scheme of 370 pages. A lot of the book is images and steps required to do each project.

In all there is 11 chapters starting with an introduction and then right into projects.

1. Introduction
2. Active Deskchop - a nice guillotine for cutting anything from pens to carrots at your desk
3. Ballistamail - the missile launcher
4. Maple Mike - a desktop golf ball driver
5. DeskBeam Bass - need to play a bass guitar right on your desk?
6. The Gynsin Device - a light tube to stimulate the mind iBlow - a bubble machine for your desk. The simplest to make it seemed
7. Liquid Len Meets Discohead - a mirrored head reflecting light
8. The Haze-o-Matic 3000 Fog Machine - now who doesn't need fog at their desk?
9. Hammerhead Live - a mechanical drum machine
10. Homebrew Wood Finishes

So there you go. If you have woodworking and tool tap and die skills this book rocks. If you are a geek like me that can do simple stuff at home but might cut off a finger, then read and laugh but don't try this at home.

I received a comment from Kaden who was quite correct, it is tap and die, not tool and die as I originally placed in the writing.

I get asked this question often and there are factors around total usage, number of chats and the rest of the usual suspects.  But I wanted to show you a simple screenshot of memory from the gateway being up somewhere around forever in terms of the Sametime Gateway



There you go, just over 600MB of RAM dedicated to the gateway including some DB2 processes

So last week I had a blog posting about the issue surrounding the Premier Audio Adapter for Sametime.  One question came in that needed a definite answer.  Some of you were trying to update the certificate and could not find the location.  Well from Chris O himself who did the majority of making Premier talk through submission holds, here you go:

Location of keystore for Premier - Tell him to look in the notes.ini for the location of the java SSL keystore.  That is the location of the file it is using.  We actually had to remove the file and then create a new one with ikeyman and import the Equifax cert since it is not a default certificate

So all 3 days are completed here in Vegas.  We have already done Philly and Chicago is only 2 weeks out.  I missed almost all of day 1 flying in, but I was here for days 2 and 3 to talk to attendees around presenting.  I gleaned the following facts:

• About 95% of the attendees did not want to have a session on the Productivity Tools.  Many said 10 slides glazing over the topic would be enough as they are so entrenched in MS licensing there was not a recent chance.  plus, they were not the ones that would even make that decision
• About 85% of the attendees here already had Sametime running and were eager to see more info on what was coming in integration and implementation
• About 20% had any interest in Lotus Connections.  70% had no clue what it really did and the remaining knew already they did not want it.
• About 15% of the attendees here had over 20k users installed.  Many with large DWA implementations in place
• About 80% really wanted to get more info on Quickr
• About 95% loved all the ways that the products were starting to integrate tighter.  For example, all the hooks with Lotus Connections and Quickr into Notes 8 and Sametime and Sametime into Notes 8.  It is all making a cohesive direction from Lotus

One last stat came to mind:

• About 99% of the people in Las Vegas will wear absolutely anything on Halloween to win $1500 at the Voodoo club contest.  Even 50 stories above the strip, most clothing is optional.