Allow me to be the first to congratulate you for purchasing this book. Sametime 8.5 is a very different product from previous versions of the product. What once was a simple offering that provided secure instant messaging with some web conferencing capabilities has now evolved into a robust, flexible, sophisticated communications platform. This book, written from the perspective of a Domino Administrator, will help you get the most out of this platform.

For reasons I can't fully explain, the major innovations in Sametime seem to come with the "dot five" releases and 8.5 was no exception. Consider, for a moment, this partial list of enhancements:

As Sametime has matured into a full unified communications platform, the skill set required to plan, deploy, and manage it has also evolved. Chapter 2 , Chapter 3 , and Chapter 9 will introduce you to the various servers that make up the product family. This componentized architecture is one of the ways that 8.5 is different from previous iterations of Sametime. It provides much more flexibility by allowing you to deploy more or less of any given capability to suit your specific needs. But that flexibility also requires you to make new decisions and, in conjunction with the earlier chapters, rely on Chapter 5 (planning considerations) to step you through the thought process.

Another key change to Sametime has been the migration to WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and DB2 for all new servers. WAS is a different animal from Domino and, in Chapter 4 , the authors have provided a 'Rosetta stone' for Domino admins. It is an excellent resource and well worth the time to thoroughly digest.

The remaining chapters step you through the process to install ( Chapter 6 ) and secure your environment (Chapter 7 ), customizing and delivering clients ( Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 ), integrating with other software ( Chapter 8 and Chapter 10 ) and interacting with the outside world (Chapter 9 ).

Of course, Sametime 8.5 is not the end of our journey. Just as the industry has migrated from collaboration to unified communications, social business looms on the horizon. Social forms of interaction—micro-blogging, status updates, blogs, and wikis—are rapidly becoming strategic forms of business communications. In many instances, they have taken the place of the phone call and voicemail as they provide access to knowledge when the expert isn't or can't be available. Blending social concepts with today's rich forms of communications (such as video), the explosion in mobile devices and tables (such as the iPad), new delivery and business models (such as the cloud), and managing the resulting governance and compliance challenges will be our focus as we look towards the future of Sametime.

John Del Pizzo

Program Director and Head of Product Management, IBM Sametime

twitter: jrdpizzo

linkedin: linkedin.com/in/johndelpizzo

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