IBM formally launched Lotus Sametime 7.5 this morning. Way to go IBM for building fast and for living up to your hype. They announced it less than a year ago and it’s already “shipped” so to speak.

Sametime 7.5 is more than an incremental release. It opens up collaboration tools in several directions. It opens IM to communicate with competing products, and introduces client-side support for Mac OS X 10.4 and Linux. It is also built with the Eclipse development framework enabling third-party companies to build plug-ins and apps for Sametime. (with more than a hundred such plug-ins available by year-end)

The real-time collaboration piece seems very similar in form and function to WebEx and GotoMeeting but is more inclusive. The IM with other providers is pretty neat. It shares applications which is a big plus in my book over tools like IMconferencing which requires that you upload the slideshows in advance to compile somehow (taking preparation and killing it for use as a collaboration tool).

Sametime has a click to talk (like other IMs do) and a click to call like Skype which is quite cool. In a conference call, rather than having to dial in, users can click themselves after logging in and it calls them. That’s very nice.

As far as the IM goes, companies can brand it as they wish, manage permissions granularly through roles and rules and choose to archive chats.

This really seems like a great product. I can’t imagine that Microsoft is going to be able to come up with something any better and they’ll be a year late to the party. Groove was always groovy but not with audio. Audio has to be great and have five nines or else it’s useless. On top of that, with Eclipse IBM will have the entire user base adding features. I really think IBM hit a home run with this.

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