Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development

When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief that real-time communication should be as open as possible. We hoped that people would have their choice of service provider, but still be able to chat with other networks using their preferred client. With our support for XMPP federation, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard.

Today, we're excited that IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5. This means that Google Talk and Lotus Sametime IM users can simply invite one another to chat, bringing together enterprise and personal IM users around the world. If you use Lotus Sametime at the office and have colleagues who use Google Talk, now you can chat with them. Similarly, if you're a Google Talk business user you can now add professional contacts who use Lotus Sametime to your Friends list -- just some of the benefits of interoperability.

It's great to see such momentum around open communication. With so many networks supporting XMPP you can now chat with your buddies on LiveJournal, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!