It's been said that it takes a village to raise a child. It's also true that it takes a community to write a book. Given that IBM/Lotus software is centered on collaboration, it isn't surprising that we relied heavily on the collaboration of many in our professional and personal community to make this book as thorough as possible.

Thank you to the team at Packt Publishing for their invaluable assistance and for giving us the opportunity to become first time authors. Also many thanks go to Esther Schindler, Rich Santalesa, and the rest of the members of the Internet Press Guild. Their group experience, along with the unselfish sharing of their knowledge, helped us avoid a number of pitfalls, and start the journey to print.

This book would have been next to impossible without the assistance of Gabriella and Tim Davis and the team at The Turtle Partnership. They graciously provided us with access to a test server environment. Thanks also to the Bleedyellow and Lotus Greenhouse sites which were invaluable in the creation of the chapters on Sametime Advanced and Sametime 8.5 and 8.5.1. Special recognition goes to Mary Beth Raven and Tracee Wolf as well for making sure we had the contacts and materials we needed. We received valuable feedback and input on our writing and ideas from various individuals over the course of the months it took to put our words onto the page, including Susan Bulloch, Paul Mooney, Wes Morgan, Gabriella Davis, Kathy Brown, Chris Miller, Carl Tyler, and Steve McDonagh.

Many thanks also go to our colleagues who stepped in at the end of the project to provide technical editing within a very short timeframe: Bob Balaban, Casey Brown, Susan Bulloch, Sean Burgess, Mitch Cohen, Corey Davis, Gabriella Davis, Gregg Eldred, Steve McDonagh, Stuart McIntyre, Chris Miller, Paul Mooney, and Julian Robichaux.

As co-authors, who for most of the project were three thousand miles apart, we may not have been quite so organized and on schedule without the use of Dropbox. It's software that just works.

Finally to our families, friends, fellow bloggers, tweeters, chat partners, and Facebook friends—we thank you for your encouragement and enthusiasm for this project. When things started to drag and we wondered where the next few pages were going to come from, you were there to remind us to keep laughing and keep going!