Lotusphere: RT Collaboration Roadmap

Presence Everywhere
In the browser, website, mobile device, application. Sametime on the Blackberry. Goal: Federated Model, multiple protocols,

Enhanced User Experience
Integrated collaboration – awareness in email & calendar, collaboration in context.

Voice/Telephone/Video/IM Interoperability
Click-to-call using existing telephony system or VOIP or whatever. ST 7.5 Click-to-talk. Reduction of voicemail. Presence ? Text chat ? Voice call ? Web conference make this flow and transition easy.

Activity:Social Network:Organizational Collaboration
Activity centric computing, social networking, expertise location. SkillTap, FreeJam, Question Search, Instant Pools, Alerts. This is stuff that grew up internally with the IBM Community Tools over the last couple of years. Talked about SkillTap and about saving the response to the question, rateing the response and rating the user who provided the response, like eBay buyer/seller rating.

Architecture changes on the Roadmap

Themes: ST 7.5, RTC Gateway, WCS, ST Future, Converging Architectures.
There is only one RT Collaboration strategy. ST is part of Workplace, ST and Workplace will converge in a managable and seemless way. Some dates on the next steps in the delivery of products on the roadmap.

Theme 1: Web Conferencing connectivity – major improvements in connecting and managing the session, automatic re-connect. JVM 1.1 was limiting, going to more current JVM (1.4?).

Theme 2: Competitive client experience – modernize, unified IM client, managed eclipse-based, plugin architecture, voice chat, rich text, emoticons,

Theme 3: IM Federation – connect to remote IM communities to Sametime & other vendors via SIP Gateway

Theme 4: Integrated Voice – signal over ST, five way calling – one user is hub, Voice only to St7.5 client now (others in future)

RTC Gateway Themes

Theme 1: Federation of IM Domains – connect your community to other external companies communities.

Theme 2: Co-existence of multiple IM servers – Sametime community connected to Workplace community replication of presence between communities.

Theme 3: Management of extranet traffic – privacy enforcement, content filtering, access control. Gateway level controls.

Theme 4: Open Programming Model – Ability to plug in new/evolving protocols.

Gateway diagram

There is a hint at an Ms-SIP protocol translator for future connection to MSN?

Workplace: WCS 3.0 will have the ST 7.5 client capabilities and SIP will scale. Web conference in WMC client as opposed to browser. Workplace will use the same technology that is currently being released in ST 7.5, same gateway, same client etc.Instant meeting (ala ST) in WCS. Open programming model to use RTC capabilities.

ST Future
2007 – Emphasis on RTC as a Platform, open it up and allow the creative creation of new solutions. java-less ajax-style web clients. Move to javascript only, requires extensions to Websphere. Make it protocol agnostic (conceptual architecture diagram)

Converging architectures
Build as general purpose extensions to WAS to support SIP. WAS 6.1 will have SIP technology
SIP Stack with RFC 3261 and others. Full stack @ WAS. Stateless SIP Proxy developed as an extension to the Websphere Proxy. (picture)
SIP Container preprocessor – extension of web container to handle SIP
Handles clustering just like WAS to give redundancy & capacity to SIP/IM as well as WAS

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