Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. [...]

(Alternate Title: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Facebook and Twitter)
Last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston is in the books, and while I’d like to give the usual kudos to Steve Wylie and team for a well organized, and well executed event, I thought it also appropriate the share some thoughts as [...]

Lotusphere 2009 kicked off this morning with the Blue Man Group and Dan Akroyd setting the stage for a flurry of announcements around Notes, Sametime, Quickr, Connections, and Websphere Portal. Most of the announcements were evolutionary enhancements to products announced in the last two years with two notable exceptions - the launch of LotusLive and [...]

This morning, the big news out of VoiceCon (news on the last day… yay!) was IBM and Microsoft’s promise to achieve true federation between OCS and Sametime. That’s good news for unified communications (although I have to side with the folks who wonder why “federation” is an acceptable solution, when “open-standrads-based interoperability” is really what’s needed). [...]

IBM just announced that Global Hyatt Corporation will standardize on Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime for unified communications and collaboration. The company, which operates in more than 45 countries, intends to offer the software to thousands of employees as well as all 365 managed, operated and franchised hotels.

Avistar has announced thatit has entered into a series of agreements with IBM to integrate Avistar’s bandwidth management software and related intellectual property with IBM’s Lotus Sametime UC offerings (more details will come next week). This is good news for IBM’s customers, since adding UC capabilities to any network necessarily ups the demands on that [...]

IBM Lotus just announced a new Research project it calls “Sametime 3-D,” which will add a “virtual world” atmosphere to Sametime–either through integration with said worlds (such as OpenSim), or through Sametime itself (the new app will let people use Sametime as a virtual environment, complete with avatars and 3-D objects).

Eric Krapf breaks the news that IBM and Microsoft have agreed to conduct interoperability testing of Sametime and OCS and report their results at VoiceCon fall in November.
It’s obvious that the technical challenges in interfacing IM and presence capabilities between the two systems can be overcome, but the ability to interoperate is hindered by business [...]

Since my fellow blogger Jonathan Spira did a good job of summing up the news out of Lotusphere, and IBM has all the releases on its Web site for anyone needing more detail, I thought I’d weigh in with a small collection of related but random thoughts on the show.

This week was the 15th annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida.  It was my 15th as well, although my count includes three Lotuspheres in Europe.  
IBM unleashed a fire hose of announcements at the opening general session.  We’ll try to walk through the most interesting ones here.  It’s a lot of material but you should [...]