The essence of the Sametime product is about collaboration and communication among people and groups. As such, it is not surprising that writing a book about Sametime involves cooperation, communication, and collaboration with numerous people within our personal and professional communities.

Thank you to the team at Packt Publishing for supporting this book and for guiding the three of us through the writing process. Getting our thoughts and words organized and published will make many of our technical colleagues very happy.

We also extend our appreciation to IBM for permitting us to get a jumpstart on this book as beta users of Sametime 8.5.2, especially John Delpizzo, Lilach Ofek, David Marshak, Rob Ingram, and Avshalom Houri.

Thanks to our friends at the Turtle Partnership for use of their valuable server resources as well as our partners in crime at Lucy Sky Diamonds.

Many thanks and kudos go to the Sametime experts we called on to read and review the chapters for readability, content, and accuracy. 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 Paul Mooney, Susan Bulloch, Mitch Cohen, Carl Tyler, and Wes Morgan.

And as co-authors, who for most of the project were separated by multiple time zones, we may not have been quite so organized and on schedule without the use of Dropbox. It is a software that just works. And finally to our families, friends, fellow bloggers, tweeters, chat partners, Google+ Circles, 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!