Carl Tyler's Blog

Category : Flight Game
A couple of months ago I started my participation in the Microsoft Flight beta program, the details and the NDA meant that I couldn't speak about the beta, but now Microsoft Flight is available.  

Now i've been using Microsoft Flight Simulator since the early days, when it booted of it's own 5.25" disk so I've watched this program evolve over the years.  A couple of years Microsoft disbanded the Flight Simulator development team, and to be honest never really explained why, I believe the group very easily funded it's own development.  After they laid off that team, they created a new one which would build what became Microsoft Flight.

Now Microsoft Flight and Microsoft Flight Simulator have a number of things in common, they both have Microsoft Flight in their name, they both involve flying aircraft and they're both from Microsoft, and that's about it.

Microsoft Flight does not have simulator in it's name and that's for good reason, Microsoft Flight is not a simulator, it's a game.  Microsoft is really aiming Microsoft Flight at an online audience that wants to fly against others and do challenges.  The program is free, with users having options to buy additional planes and locations etc. in the future.  Similar to the model being used by simraceway with an online racing community.  Microsoft Flight will take a new user through a tutorial on how to fly the included planes, and will take them through a number of challenges, progressively getting harder.

So what's my take on it?  Well I like that it's free, and you get to fly around part of Hawaii for free, but it's a game, it's no simulator.  I like that it doesn't use GameSpy which is the biggest POS for connecting to and was the major downside to online connections with Flight Simulator (why oh why Microsoft can't you replace that online engine with an update?)  I had no trouble connecting to the new online service during the Beta, but my brother (also on the beta) did have some problems, but we think they were Beta related.  Flight does require an internet connection to function.  If you're looking for an update to Microsoft Flight Simulator, this isn't it, but if you want to get your feet wet just flying a plane with simple physics etc. then at the price it can't be beat.  For online play that's interesting they better add guns pretty sharpish, this working together lark is lots of fun, but after a while you just want to become the Red Baron or Biggles and shoot people down.  Oh and a PS for Glen, they have  Stearman.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 04:51:57 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category : Sametime Proxy
As many know I really like the functionality of the Sametime Proxy, and I really like what IBM did with the SDK.  During the betas, I express concern that I thought the name for the product was confusing.  I was firmly told that was pretty much just me. So I always laugh when I see technotes with titles like this one:

"WebSphere Proxy redirects to Sametime Proxy unexpectedly"

The Sametime Proxy is running on Websphere, but it is a not a Websphere Proxy, and is not managed in the same area as Websphere Proxies, because it isn't a Websphere proxy, it's a Sametime proxy.  Not confusing at all.  It reminds me of that great Abbot and Costello skit from 1945.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/sShMA85pv8M?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So I still love the product, just hate the confusion the name creates

Posted by Carl Tyler At 04:58:56 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category : Snow Circles

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:04:42 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category : Parachute Fool
The video shows it...

Posted by Carl Tyler At 02:08:00 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Sametime Branding
With Sametime 8.5.2, many of us believed IBM had a small bug in their code with the login panel not having any kind of graphics or colouring, as can be seen here:



I'm suprised IBM didn't add the text "This space has been intentionally left blank"

The same cleansing process has now taken place with Sametime Proxy, so this is a conscious design decision by someone.

Before



After


Which do you think looks better?

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:40:35 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category : AdminDev Sametime
I'll be presenting two sessions at the AdminDev 2012 Conference taking place in Washington DC, May 16-18.  The two sessions are:  What's new in Sametime 8.5.2 IFR1 and Sametime administration best practices.

The View folks currently have an early bird discount with $300 off,  that ends Friday (24th).  So if you were going to go, or were thinking of going, get in early for a discounted price.  I hope to see you there.

www.viewad2012.com

Posted by Carl Tyler At 09:46:57 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Flying Ice
This weekend it was time to do the Alton Bay (B18) ice runway again. Alton Bay is the only FAA designated iceport in the USA, it is located on the surface of the southern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee, 21.4nm to the northeast of Concord, New Hampshire.  Last year due to a weird mix of snow, rain and cold weather they were never able to get a smooth surface so the ice runway didn't open, this year has been very mild, with very little snow so much of Lake Winnipesaukee hasn't even frozen over this year, which is very unusual.  

Fortunately a week or so ago, there was some good news that the ice runway was open as the ice was thick enough at about a foot (30cm) and strong enough to take landing planes.  Earlier this year I had promised to take a friend flying as a birthday present, so what could be more unique than taking them to an ice runway.  First I flew down to Minute Man airfield in Stow, Massachusetts to pick him up, and then we flew up to Alton Bay.  This also gave me the opportunity to have someone get out of the plane with one of my cameras, let me take off again and have them record my landing.  This enabled me to create the following videos where you can see the landing from both inside and outside, which is the first time I've been able to combine the two.  My brother in the UK grabbed a photo of the plane in the parking area from a webcam.  

After some low level flying around Lake Winnipesaukee and buzzing a few brave (maybe stupid) ice fisherman, headed back to Minute Man, where we grabbed something to eat at Nancy's Airfield Cafe. After grabbing a burger I headed back to Portsmouth, at this point it was now night flying, and clouds had started to form. I'd planned to fly back to Portsmouth at 3500 feet, but I discovered it was snowing at that altitude so I took the plane back down to 3000 feet.  It has to be said, flying in snow with the landing light on at night, is much like the effect you see in Sci Fi programs where someone jumps into light speed, if you're not sure of that effect think of the Windows screensaver where the stars are flying towards you.

Here are a collection of some of the videos of me landing this weekend, and also some photos.



The same video, but with Picture-in-Picture



A video that I happened to find on YouTube of my first landing.


Some photos that my passenger took.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:14:06 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category : Notes.net Forums
I heard it a few times at Lotusphere from different development groups, "ask your questions on stackoverflow"  I've not really heard any reason given for this to be the new location of where to ask questions.  But it does make me wonder, are the Notes.net forums going to get booted and replaced by stackoverflow?  If they do, I hope it works better than the move to wikis from redbook type documentation.  I suppose hosting notes.net costs IBM money, stackoverflow wouldn't.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:06:56 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (8) |      

Category : Sametime Proxy
So this is a pretty simple issue to see, and a simple issue to resolve, but you could easily take hours trying to figure it out. The IBM Sametime Proxy SDK ships with an example for embedding a Sametime chat window in a web page (Example 7), many of you (me included) may try this and find that indeed the chat is embedded, but as soon as the other user responds, it opens up a new chat window.  Anyway, the solution is simple, use the Canonical name for the user in the HTML.  This video explains it and shows it in action.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 09:51:31 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category : SamtimeProxy TheView
I forgot to post this whilst I was at Lotusphere The View published a new article I wrote on the Sametime 8.5.x proxy.  It's an introduction article that can get you started with development.

Discover the Sametime 8.5.x Proxy server and its new client for browsers and iPhone. Learn what the Proxy server does, how it works, and the ways that you can add Sametime presence to Web sites using the powerful APIs exposed in the server’s Browser Client toolkit.

The View requires a subscription to read the article and can find the article here:

http://epil.io/u8ip0

or here:

http://epil.io/zzkjp

If you have a View subscription and have any feedback, please let me know.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:34:41 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category : Hiking Ireland
Rather foolishly or rather smartly, I have not yet decided, late last year I agreed to take part in the  2012 Big Bloggers Dander for Dosh (not sure it was called big last year, perhaps they added that for me?), anyway, I signed up and I will be taking part in the week prior to UKLUG

Why should this concern you?  Well during the year I'm going to be trying to hit you up for sponsor money, all those people that I've ever helped free of charge with a Sametime question, it's going to be time to cough up, all those folks that are using the free Epilio plug-ins and tools and never pressed the Facebook like button, you'll need to pay up too.  So let this be fair warning to you, start saving your pennies, I'll be expecting you to sponsor me and I wont be shaving my head this time.

If you're interested in taking part, put a comment on Steve's blog I'm sure we can accommodate.

For those that always ask about Jessie, and the majority of people that read this blog do, and she does appreciate it, it is my plan to try and take Jessie, so we will be training leading up to the event, and hopefully I will have all her pet passport etc. sorted out for entering the UK.  26 miles may not sound like far, but now imagine doing it with a couple of hundred pound back pack!

Posted by Carl Tyler At 05:59:11 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category : Lotusphere NoFacts
Overall the feedback I have been hearing from people around Lotusphere 2012 has been very positive, they liked the OGS and felt very positive afterwards.  What I personally took from the OGS was this, having no panels will score you big points with the attendees, saying Notes or Domino will get you the largest cheers in the OGS.  Mike Rhodin's speech basically bored me to tears, it's the same sentences as his section at every other Lotusphere, just in a slightly different order, if you're playing buzzword bingo, you only need to pay attention during his and Sandy Carter's bit.  Michael J Fox was inspirational and made me feel sad at the same time.  I don't feel sad for Michael J Fox, but I do feel sad that someone so young is slowly being taken over by a disease he has no control over, that makes me sad.  The way he is handling it though, and the efforts he is making to raise money are inspirational.  It also brings guilt, here I am with a body that does react to my commands (well apart from the jump high one) and I'm taking it for granted.  So a great opening speaker, but lots of different emotions.  I think along with panels, OGS is seen as positive if you don't say anything bad towards Notes/Domino, so as long as you don't say Notes/Domino is dead you're in good shape, but honestly, all the new stuff IBM is heavily pushing is WAS based, the web experience WAS, Connections WAS, Social Mail WAS.

OK so now onto some of the things shown and what I think the future holds.  So this is my gut feel of what we can expect to see in the future based upon things seen and heard around Lotusphere 2012.  None of this is based upon any factual information, or  from back room chats, or information from old friends, this is just my gut feel for how things are going to go after watching what was shown at Lotusphere.  So let me begin with IBM Docs.

I think I blogged at the time when IBM Symphony was the wrong move, IBM Docs is where IBM should have been all along.  Symphony is not a game changer, IBM Docs is.  IBM Symphony is now part of Apache, IBM will tell you that IBM is committed to Symphony, but I personally think the move to Apache is the first step of many where IBM will be able to start reducing the effort that is placed in Symphony.  IBM has a dirty secret, Lotus SmartSuite makes more revenue for IBM that Symphony, yep IBM still sells SmartSuite, did you know that? They still have some customers on maintenance, amazing isn't it.  Symphony doesn't have revenue, and I can't think of any product at IBM that makes zero revenue that stays around, after a few reorgs and someone new comes in that wasn't involved, they will always ask why do we have product x that makes 0$ ?  So I expect in the coming years, you will see less and less in the way of Symphony updates unless they are from developers working at home for free (kind of like Lotus focused redbooks).  Don't get me wrong, I think Symphony was an interesting idea, it was just more than 10 years late of when it was needed.  As I said, none of this is based in fact, just my gut feel on what we'll see.

Biggest cheer of the OGS, the Notes plug-in for browsers.  Details are sketchy right now, but basically you'll have the equivalent of 90% of the Notes Basic client able to run inside a windows browser.   So how do I think this will be used? My gut is this will be used as a migration tool for folks moving away from Notes.  Sure there will be some that use it on their path migrating to Xpage apps, but my gut is that most will use this as a tool to help their migration away from Notes.  Now here's the thing, if that is the case it won't be reflected in Notes CAL sales very quickly, I imagine this is going to require a Notes CAL to be used, which means that customers before which were moving just stopped paying maintenance will now stay on maintenance to get the plugin.  I think what IBM hopes will happen, is this will speed up the adoption of XPage apps, personally I think the opposite will happen, I think maybe companies that were considering moving some Notes apps to Xpages, will now just say, you know what, we can save a tonne of money by just giving people the notes app in the browser instead of rewriting it, and any net new apps will be done on some other platform.  I can imagine there being companies that even expose some of their "Legacy" (not my choice of phrase but IBM now use it) Notes apps inside Sharepoint via the plugin.

Sametime - with IBM shipping Sametime 8.5.2 IFR1 late last year, there wasn't really any Sametime news this year, well no announcement anyway.  Most interesting thing I saw though was a session given by Bill Quin and Rob Fox, AD206 The upcoming IBM Sametime Meetings Server Remote Client SDK.  This SDK looks like it has some really exciting potential, so keep an eye on it.  Not Sametime related directly, but I did attend a demonstration in the Dolby suite at the Dolphin.  Dolby were showing how they can improve the effectiveness of online audio calls through some of their magical jiggery pokery.  If you imagine a regular audio call with lets say 6 people, if everyone is speaking at the same time, you just kind of hear blugh and it's hard to differentiate between people.  What Dolby have done, is taken those different audio input streams, and make it sound like the people in the call are sitting around you in different places.  So just as if you were in a real room with people chatting around you and you can tune in to hear the different people quite easily, you can do the same with the Dolby system.  This isn't a solution that Dolby is selling for customers, it's a technology that vendors could include in their solutions, kind of the way, SONY could include Dolby support back in the Walkman days.  It wouldn't surprise me if sometime in the not too distant feature you see a audio conferencing company as promoting their conferencing software with Dolby inside.  For best results it does require a stereo headset in order to simulate the spacial awareness.  Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Social Mail - For me my eyes kind of glazed over at this point.  Basically for email I need only a couple of things, my All Documents view and full text index, that's where I spend 99% of my time when in mail.  The idea of my mail and everything else being in a stream just doesn't work for me, and for a company the size of Epilio (think the same size as those 6 million other small businesses in the US), the number of servers required to get Social Mail just isn't going to fly for us.  From what I could see it basically looked like a web page running inside a Notes client, I may be wrong, but that's how it looked.  For large companies this may be the best thing since the fax machine, I'm taking a wait and see attitude on this one.  I think it could struggle though, with the same thing Notes has struggled with against Outlook.  "We like Outlook as it's just mail" but wait "Social mail is more than mail, it's streaming connections, files, you can act of things, it's cool, you want more than mail surely?"  as I said, I'll wait and see.

The Closing General Session - Lessons learned here for IBM I think are if you're going to have someone that isn't known around the world they better be inspirational, Zander was known by less people that Bob Costas, but he went down really well as he was inspirational.  Lotusphere attendees don't like me me me type personalities.  We're really separated from the food we eat, someone chopping up a clam on stage really upset some people, the same people that a few minutes before had quite happily eaten a meat sandwich, apologies to those of you that are Vegetarian, you have reason to be upset.  Personally, I do watch the guys show so I didn't find it that bad.  I would have loved to have seen a situation with 5 Lotusphere attendees up there where a kind of mini fear factor with food was done.  Other takeaway IBM VPs will eat something fishy that looks like a penis in front of hundreds if it means looking good in front of their boss.  As for me, you could have been chopping brocoli up on stage, I still wouldn't eat it.  So I didn't mind the CGS at all, but others hated it with a passion.

I did get told by a few folks that they didn't feel there was enough technical  content and the pendulum had swung too far towards MBA type sessions, where basically you could say anything you wanted as long as it fitted within IBMs message.

There you go, a poorly laid out ramble.  As I said not based on facts, purely my gut feel.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 02:02:52 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (18) |      

Category : Large wave
I think this wave could do some terrible damage to you if you didn't know what you were doing.  The person who made this video knew what they were doing.


More Surfing Videos

Posted by Carl Tyler At 11:29:21 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category : Lotusphere Content
I am back from Lotusphere into the sub zero New England temperatures, as I promised during my Lotusphere Session BP209, I have posted the slides and demonstration content on the Epilio website.  You can find the slides and the demonstration file details here:
http://www.epilio.com/web/lotusphere2012.htm

If you did attend the session, please be sure to complete your evaluation.  These help me a great deal in deciding content for future events.  For those of you that got up early on Thursday morning and came along, I thank you.  I hope you found it both enjoyable and educational.

Also, a continuation of my previous post with regard to Lotusphere videos.  You can find all the videos I took of people at Lotusphere here in this YouTube playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL68DB220720A7718B

I will probably compile my Lotusphere 2012 thoughts in a separate post.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:39:56 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category : Lotusphere Videos
As with last year, I'm doing video snippets of folks that are willing to give them.  Posted 3 from today, I've even created a little intro collection.








If you're at Lotusphere and you're willing to provide your expectations or  impressions so far, please feel free to stop me, I take all of 2 minutes.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:16:23 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Lotusphere Orlando
Yes I will be going to the ball.  Ooops, I mean Lotusphere.  I will be presenting a single session (why do all that extra work of additional sessions), and have quite a few meetings and social engagements planned.  I still have room on my dance card however, so if you'd like to meet to discuss Unified Comms solutions or opportunities ie opportunities for my company to work with you, or maybe you just want a free general advice chit chat, shoot me an email at ctylerls@epilio.com and we can set up a convenient time and place to meet.  

Here's where you'll definitely be able to find me whilst I'm down there:

BP209 Doctors have scalpels, carpenters have hammers, IBM Sametime Developers have SDKs
Often the hidden power of a platform lies in its Software Development Kits (SDKs) and IBM Sametime is no exception. IBM Sametime has one of the richest SDKs of any UC platform, and knowing about its capabilities can allow companies to understand further how they can fully exploit all of the capabilities Sametime offers
DL N. Hemisphere E - Thursday  08:30 AM - 09:30 AM

You don't have to be a developer to attend this session, if you're just wondering how you can make Sametime a more valuable asset within your company, this would be a good session to attend.

UK Night - Shula's Monday 8pm - 10pm Sunday
Epilio is proud to beone of the sponsors for this event again.  This is the third year, and is a fun and popular event every year.  I look forward to sharing a few jars with you there.

The Great Geek Challenge - The Fountain Restaurant (bottom of escalator Dolphin hotel) - 8pm till the quiz finishes.
This took place for the first time last year and was a huge success and everyone attending had lots of fun.  I'll be emceeing/quiz master with Paul Mooney, so put on your thinking caps, and come along and join a team.  There are great prizes and plenty of challenging questions (which is why I'm quiz master, don't want to look stupid by not being able to answer any of them).

Bloggers and friends Annual Lotusphere Dinner (BALD) - Saturday 3.30pm Big River Grille on the boardwalk.  
Normally I miss this as I am at another event, this year I'm free so I'll finally be able to attend.

The Turtle Party - ESPN - Boardwalk Saturday Night.
I get to this one late, normally after the party has finished, but the Lotus faithful are still around partying hard with their first party of the week.  

Opening General Session - Monday 8am - 10am
I'll be there, and like the last few years, www.lotuspherelive.com will be up and running.  This year,  I'll have a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than 30 minutes.

GURU101 GURUpalooza! - Thursday 10am - 11am
Don't worry I won't be blue this year, so Tom your head is safe.  On the off chance a question comes up about Lotus Approach I'll be there to answer it.

Blogger Open - Thursday 4.45pm - 6.45pm
Watch out <<insert favourite golf player here>>, as I will be using all my minigolf skills to either win or come last this year.  I'm going home with a prize, one way or another.

Welcome Reception - Sunday night
The first opportunity to get an idea of how many people have come along to Lotusphere this year, and to see how tight IBM is being with the budget.  The earlier the beer and food is removed, the tighter they are.  Last year I took a lot of video at the Welcome Reception, not sure if I will do that this year, what do you all think?

Solutions Showcase  Reception - Monday night, this normally starts around 5-6pm I think
There are a lot of our customers with booths at Lotusphere, with many of them showing solutions we built for them, but which are badged as there own, so I tend to spend quite a bit of time down there.  The Solutions Showcase is a must see for anyone attending Lotusphere, it's important to show your support for partners, and it's also a great way to discover new ways of using the products within your organization.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there, if I don't see you make sure above all else you have fun.  As I said, if you're interested in a meeting to discuss Unified Communications, please shoot me a note.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:07:52 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category : IBM Sametime
Great news, IBM today released IBM Sametime 8.5.2 IFR1, seriously what are they thinking with the name?  I mean for one thing, this is the first release of Sametime now officially supported on Domino 8.5.3, and didn't IBM say they were going to sync release versions so it would be less confusing for customers (yeah I know, they did that for one release, then forgot they ever said it).  Seriously though, people hear Interim Fix and they think bug fixes, they don't think a release with some major additional features.
UPDATE: So IBM just contacted me (through Facebook chat no less)  So IFR does not mean Interim Fix Release it means Interim Feature Release, how I was confused I have no idea.

So what are the features to be found in Sametime 8.5.2 IFR1

New native client for Sametime for Apple iPhone and iPad mobile devices
Great news, a web app is adequate for many use cases, but native, installed apps are nice for a number of reasons, less network traffic, better background processing, ability to use other notification methods. Background notification of new messages, much better now on the iOS 5 devices with the notification center (Android folks always had a decent notification mechanism)

IBMs bone headed move for the mobile client?  This "A dialer providing additional mobile telephony capabilities for licensed Sametime Unified Telephony users"  Seriously IBM you are a few cans short of a six pack here.  You have telephony partners that have TCSPI solutions, your other clients support TCSPI dialing, why not put it here?  I have a concern that IBM is basically removing focus from TCSPI in a desperate attempt to make SUT the only option.  IBM messed up big time with the launch of SUT and how they delivered it to the market, I think making some options only available via SUT is not going to solve it.  I'm hoping this is actually a mistake, and someone that didn't know better wrote down SUT only and in fact TCSPI solutions (thnk Avaya, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent etc.) were just overlooked.  Not the best way to show partners commitment to something in my opinion.

New Sametime browser-based meetings for the Apple iPad and Google Android tablets
Whilst this is a catchup feature to competitive web conferencing tools like WebEx and GoToMeeting, it was much needed. I am forever attending web meetings on my iPad, whilst I continue to use my regular desktop, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.  I look forward to Sametime catching up with the other capabilities of the likes of GoToMeeting by adding audio, video support etc. in the future.

So I titled this blog entry what's old is new again, why would I say that?  Well a lot of the new features in Sametime 8.5.1 IFR1 meeting room aren't really new at all.  They're just features that IBM removed in Sametime 8.5 and have now had the time to develop and add back in the WebSphere based meeting server, examples of these "new" features

A new Leave Meeting button for owners and participants.
An Active Speaker indicator in the meeting room will quickly and clearly let you know who is speaking.
This was a big omission in Sametime 8.5  It was a feature that many telephony integrated customers on Sametime 8 liked, and then found it removed in 8.5.x, Hearing IBMers now talk about how cool this feature is in 8.5.2 IFR1, makes you wonder if they ever knew it was there before?  

So what is new?

Offline Messages
Personally I don't like this feature, well not the feature, but the idea, but I know many people that want it and like it in things like Yahoo and Skype.  Personally I hate it.  I don't want my IM client to become another inbox. This has been possible in Sametime for a long time, and the Sametime SDK has shipped with an example of how to do it since Sametime 2.0 (about 9 or years ago). I wait to see how this will be used/adopted by companies with Sametime.

Organizational tree view
I find it funny when IBM is promoting social computing and they add a feature like Organizational lookup.  We all know why people look at organization charts don't we? To decide how important the person is they're talking to, can they be ignored? Do they report to someone important, are they important?  Oh they're way down the org chart, I can ignore them.  Not exactly promoting social is it? I think this feature will be most widely adopted in very large companies, where hierarchy is very important.  Be sure to mention to you HR folks, that org data is going to have to be up to date.

If you're using your Sametime Entry license entitlement and you want some of these features, then please remember you need to purchase a Sametime license, none of these features are available to you as a Sametime Entry license.

So with all that said, this is still a release you should use/upgrade to.  Whilst some of the features are old yet new again, the reason they're back is because they were good features that people used, and people complained about when they went away.   With Sametime 8.5.2 finally adding Audio/Video that works in the real world, with the missing 8.0.x functionality now back in 8.5.2 IFR1 and the addition of native mobile meeting clients, Sametime customers can now finally look at 8.5.x, compare it to a feature table of 8.0.x.  It took a few years, but now customers can see real additional functionality, this will help customers justify the additional hardware they now require, which for many customers had been a hard justification to make.

If that's what we get for an interim fix release, I can't wait to see what we get with the next major release, I'm expecting loads of features!

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:50:40 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (8) |      

Category : Sametime Translation
A while back I posted a blog entry about Google's plans to drop their Translation SDK in December and how that would render the Sametime Translation plug-in obsolete.  Well nothing has changed there, Google still plan to drop their Translation SDK.  What has changed however, is I'm pleased to say Epilio now offers the option for users to install a new Sametime Translation plug-in which uses the Microsoft Translation server.

The new Microsoft Bing Translation plug-in is now part of really easy to use consolidated plug-in installer.  I would strongly suggest un-installing the Google Translation plug-in (via the windows control panel) before installing the Microsoft one, as to be brutally honest, we have not tried the two installed together, and you could very well get some strange results, and remember this is unsupported software, you have been warned.

Obviously if you use Sametime for any confidential chats within your organization, you don't want to be using a public translation service, but want your own translation servers, so for organizations requiring continued translation capabilities through a secure cloud or on-premises solution, please visit our partner LinguaSys and take a look at the TGChat product which was developed in conjunction with Epilio.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:59:24 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category : IBM Microsoft Lync
Here is a recent high level paper I had published on the Microsoft website concerning Integrating Microsoft Lync 2010 with IBM Social Collaboration Environments

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:41:02 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category : Sametime Security
Recently IBM business partner Integrasys identified a security risk with IBM Sametime.  Be sure to read this security bulletin and act now!

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21569452

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:34:55 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (5) |