IBM Sametime 9 Hot Fix 1 enables additional Connections integration

A couple of great new features shipped in IBM Sametime 9.0 Hot Fix 1 last week:

What’s New in Hot Fix 1

In Hot Fix 1, the following features were added to Sametime 9 Communicate, Conference, and Complete offerings:

The Chat Rooms widget displays a list of Sametime chat rooms and allows a user to enter a chat room directly from Connections. The Meeting Rooms widget displays a list of Sametime meeting rooms and allows a user to join a meeting directly from Connections.

Aspects of this feature had been available as a limited preview before now, so it is great to see this added to the full GA version of the code.  Here’s some more info:

The Chat Rooms widget provides a direct link from a Connections Community to Sametime Advanced persistent chat rooms. In a chat room, users can participate in a live conversation with other users. The chat room conversation is persisted, and can be viewed or revived at a later time. The Chat Rooms widget provides a list of chat rooms which have been created for the specific Community. Clicking a chat room link redirects the user to that chat room on the Sametime Advanced web user interface. Chat rooms can be created using the widget, which will be directly associated with the Community.

and:

The Meeting Rooms widget integrates Connections Communities and Sametime Meetings. Owners of a Community can create a meeting room, and members of the Community can view a list of available meeting rooms and join those meetings. When creating a meeting room, the widget provides fields to configure the room.

The Chat Rooms widget requires a Sametime Advanced infrastructure, whereas the Meeting Rooms one only needs a Sametime Meetings server.

These features were previewed at IBM Connect 2013.  

Both widgets will be available for download from the IBM Collaboration Solutions Catalog soon (they were slated for release before the end of November, but have not appeared yet).