Your company's needs aren't limited by geography—you might have sales reps, technicians, or business contacts in other offices, other regions, or spread across the globe. Travel and traditional conferencing are often inefficient and expensive solutions to bridge those distances, and in many cases they can slow the flow of information—and vital solutions—that your business needs.
IBM Lotus Sametime is a secure, enterprise-ready instant messaging (IM) and Web conferencing solution that can scale to provide presence awareness, instant messaging and Web conferencing to businesses of any size. Lotus Sametime helps speed communication, reduce travel expenses and produce results—your employees, customers, partners, and suppliers can immediately and easily interact with one another and collaborate in real time.
By hosting Lotus Sametime with Prominic, you realize the extra advantages of having an enterprise-class data center maintain the resilient high-speed Internet connections needed to support a geographically dispersed workforce.
IBM Lotus Sametime Hosting – Business Advantage
Prominic hosts Lotus Sametime for organizations that need to:
- Gain instant access to people and information
- Bring together team members from around the world
- Increase personal, team and organizational productivity
- Decrease response times among colleagues, customers, business partners and suppliers
- Make faster, more informed decisions
- Manage and reduce costs associated with collaborative computing
In addition to the many productivity benefits, hosting your Sametime server with Prominic (rather than supporting it internally) makes perfect sense for the organizations with remote or mobile users. Telecommuters, traveling sales staff and support personnel, even remote branch office employees need to stay in touch with their colleagues—wherever they may be. Since our data centers' connections to the Internet over multiple providers far exceed the capacity of most small and medium-sized businesses, you can avoid taxing your comparatively limited and more expensive connections to the Internet, even hosting large web conferences with audio and video feeds.
Lotus Sametime integrates IM and presence awareness in a Lotus Notes and Domino environment. Icons indicate the availability of other users and provide one-click access to chat, e-mail and conferencing tools, supporting spontaneous or planned real-time collaboration activities.
As the only offering that combines real-time collaboration capabilities in a single, fully integrated product, Lotus Sametime enables individuals and teams—and all constituents in the line of business's extended value chain—to realize ROI through greater business efficiencies and reduced costs. Let us help you make your Sametime implementation that much more efficient and cost-effective!
IBM Lotus Sametime Hosting – Technical Details
Prominic.NET's hosted Lotus Sametime offering runs on dedicated Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Edition servers (IBM does not currently support Lotus Sametime in a Linux environment).
Server Specifications (minimum recommended by Prominic)
- Pentium 4 3.0 GHz Processor
- 2 GB RAM
- 80 GB Disk Space
- Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Edition
Client Specifications
- Integrates with any Notes desktop client
- Supported via browser (Sametime Connect client) on MS Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000 SP4 on IE 6.0+, Mozilla 1.7.6 and Firefox 1.0.1 (required JDK/JRE 1.4.2)
- Integrates with BlackBerry devices (visit RIM's website for more information; external link)
Configuration Notes
- Prominic recommends against installing Lotus Sametime on a production Domino Messaging or Enterprise server. While technically possible to install Lotus Sametime on a server with other server applications already running, segmenting server software provides better all around security, performance, and reliability.
- Lotus Sametime should be installed on its own dedicated server.
- Lotus Sametime 7 requires Lotus Domino 7.
IBM Lotus Sametime Hosting – Pricing
Prominic.NET supports Lotus Sametime in a dedicated server environment. Configurations to support IM and presence awareness start at $149 per month plus setup fees in our virtual Linux environment. For more information or to create a custom configuration to meet your specific needs, contact our Sales department.
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Prominic.NET Offering
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Cost
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Hosted
Lotus Sametime
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Sametime runs on Prominic's Dedicated Domino server and Virtual Private Server (VPS) offerings. We strongly recommend a stand-alone Lotus Sametime installation on a Windows server for web conferencing (screen sharing and slide presentations). Note that a separate Lotus Domino server license is not required for the server.
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Starting at $149 per month for a VPS solution and under $400 per month (plus setup fees) for a Windows-based server.
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IBM Licensing Options
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Costs
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Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging
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Presence awareness and IM capabilities are integrated with and included at no additional charge with your separate Lotus Notes Client Access License, which you are required to own for each user accessing the Lotus Domino server. You can read about this free entitlement on IBM's website (external link).
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Free with separate purchase of a Lotus Notes Unrestricted or Lotus Domino Messaging or Collaboration Express Client Access License.
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Full Web Conferencing, Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging
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While the free Notes client license entitlement allows you to use basic presence awareness and instant messaging, the full Lotus Sametime license adds additional web conferencing and integration features. Some of the highlights include the ability to:
- Use presence awareness and instant messaging capabilities in a stand-alone Lotus Sametime Connect Client or Java Connect Client, system tray, start menu or desktop
- Initiate or attend Web conferences, share your screen or applications and share an on-line whiteboard
- Transfer files
- Upgrade on-line conversations to Web conferences and utilize capabilities such as screen and application sharing, whiteboarding and polling of participants.
- Extend Sametime to your BlackBerry handheld devices.
Per user licensing is only applicable for the customer's employees and contractors. If you wish to enable outside/extranet users on your Lotus Sametime system, you must purchase the Sametime Extranet License.
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$55 per user Client Access License (includes first year of renewable IBM software maintenance).
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Extending Lotus Sametime to your Extranet Users
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The Sametime Extranet License extends Sametime services outside your corporate environment. Integrate customers, vendors, partners and other extranet users with your internal communication systems to decrease response time and increase productivity.
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$31,842 per processor (includes first year of renewable IBM software maintenance).
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IBM Lotus Sametime Hosting – Before You Buy
Some points to consider before you purchase Lotus Sametime:
- Sametime is built on Lotus Domino, IBM's market-leading server/platform for enterprise-class collaboration. Lotus Domino combines the technical benefits of standards and cross-platform support, with over 20 years of collaboration experience.
- Although Lotus Sametime runs on a Lotus Domino server, a Lotus Sametime installation does not require a Lotus Domino Server license.
- The Sametime Extranet license seems expensive until you consider that competitors such as WebEx charge $0.33 / user / minute. At this per minute rate, a meeting with 20 people lasting one hour would cost about $400, and just 80 meetings per year (6-7 per month) would exceed the cost of the Sametime Extranet license. When you factor in the annual license renewal price for the Sametime Extranet Processor License of only $6,368 / processor, your costs are dramatically decreased cost and your ROI is that much quicker.
- Prominic only hosts Lotus Sametime on dedicated Windows servers. Lotus Sametime is not currently available on Linux.
