IBM Sametime mobile apps – official announcements

I posted earlier on about the new iOS Sametime/SUT app available for iOS.  

Here’s the official versions from IBM.  First, Sametime:

IBM Sametime 8.5.2 IFR 1 extends unified communications to Apple iOS and Google Android operating system devices and delivers significant new features to IBM Sametime Advanced

IBM Sametime provides a core set of real-time communication services designed to help make your social business actionable. Sametime can help teams organize quickly and respond with unprecedented speed and can help unified communications become a core part of your enterprise’s social business strategy.

IBM Sametime 8.5.2 Interim Feature Release (IFR) 1 further extends unified communications to new mobile devices and adds additional social collaboration capabilities.

IBM Sametime Standard 8.5.2 IFR 1 adds:

• A new native Instant Messaging client for Apple iPhone and iPad devices that includes a dialer for Sametime Unified Telephony licensed users
• New browser-based meeting participation on Google Android tablets and Apple iPads
• New Sametime meeting room features and options such as Active Speaker indication
• New platform support including Mac OS X 10.7, Domino 8.5.3, Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox 6 and 7

In addition to the enhancements in Sametime Standard, Sametime Advanced 8.5.2 IFR 1 also includes:

• Offline messaging
• Multi-file and folder transfer to individuals
• File transfers to multiple people simultaneously
• Organizational tree view

and SUT:

IBM Sametime Unified Telephony 8.5.2 IFR 1 provides new flexibility with a native Apple iOS client and server virtualization

IBM Sametime Unified Telephony is a telephony middleware application designed to provide advanced unified communications capabilities without the need to consolidate telephony infrastructure on a single vendor. Users benefit from a single, unified phone number and intelligent call routing based on location, presence, time of day, and caller ID. Ease of use includes click-to-call, click-to-conference, rich call control, along with an intuitive softphone built into the Sametime experience.

IBM Sametime Unified Telephony 8.5.2 Interim Feature Release (IFR) 1 delivers additional deployment flexibility with:

• A new Sametime client for Apple iOS devices that includes a dialer to initiate Sametime Unified Telephony calls
• Support for virtualization of the IBM Sametime Unified Telephony servers

Sametime Unified Telephony Lite Client now supports IBM Sametime Standard and Sametime Advanced 8.5.2 IFR 1.

Clearly, this new IFR 1 fix is essential to the operation of the new clients, so that’s going to be first thing to get done before your users start to download and use the client.  I’m already really impressed by the new Sametime native app for iOS and it looks as though the team has followed a similar model to the IBM Connections mobile clients – make the best use of the features of the mobile Web UI (thus making it easier to update centrally) whilst adding mobile functionality in the native app (uploading pictures etc).

Also of note, new support for OS X Lion, Domino 8.5.3 and latest versions of IE and Firefox.  So this small IFR 1 fixpack looks to be a very big deal!