IBM Offers Free Trial for Lotus Sametime

June 12, 2007 Alex Woodie

Interested in sampling IBM‘s flagship product for unified communication and collaboration (UC2)? Then you might be interested in a deal Big Blue announced last week for free 90-day trial copies of Lotus Sametime 7.5.1, its platform for instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing, point-to-point video, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

As the centerpiece of IBM’s UC2 strategy, Lotus Sametime incorporates a single product to allow people and organizations to share words, images, and sound without getting bogged down opening and managing multiple-point products. Also, through hooks into IBM’s Java tools and the Eclipse development framework–not to mention integration with Microsoft‘s Office apps–IBM has made it relatively easy to integrate Sametime into customers’ existing applications. With its connections into the System i IP Telephony offering from IBM and 3com, Sametime offers i5/OS customers even more.

Now that we’re on the cusp of UC2 greatness, IBM decided to seed the market a little bit with a teaser 90-day trial offer for Sametime version 7.5.1, which became available in April. IBM hopes that its customers will take advantage of the offer, get hooked on Web 2.0-style communication, and fork over the $57 per-user license fee following the end of the free trial.

The 90-day trial version of Lotus Sametime includes client and server components. Supported clients include Windows, Linux, and Macintosh and supported servers include i5/OS, AIX, Linux, Windows, and z/OS servers. Once customers buy the full Sametime licenses, they can get the Lotus Sametime Gateway, which allows users to connect with the broader instant messaging community, including those using AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger networks.

To download the Lotus Sametime 90-day trial, go to www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lst.