Has anybody ever?
by Volker Weber
While I was trying to understand how one addresses buddies in other IM networks through the Sametime Gateway, I said "I now added you as xxx@us.ibm.com. Will be interesting to see if that works", to which the other guy answered "Well, we haven't deployed the gateway here at IBM yet, so it won't for a little while".
This must have been a helluva beta test.
Comments
Beta tested inside IBM? Absolutely. Rolled out in production for our 380,000+ Sametime users? Soon, but not just yet.
I have recently heard some big numbers in discussions. Be it 46,000+ customers, or 380,000+ Sametime users. So I have three questions:
Is every single worker bee in IBM factories Sametime enabled?
Do you have to roll out in production the Sametime Gateway to all 380,000+ IBMers at the same time?
How does one test internally and then roll out in production the Sametime Gateway to 53,000,000 AIM, 20,000,000 ICQ, 21,000,000 Yahoo users?
I know Adam can get the tech answers, but the Gateway doens't act like your question was stated. You wished to run the gateway and then add xxx@us.ibm.com as a buddy. There is some config steps missing. You have not told it where IBM is, or you presume they are provisioned.
You can roll out the gateway to subsets of users with the access control. I am one of the first to say it is not granular enough, but you can limit how many connections or who goes through which protocol
I am up and live with the Gateway, nothing to do on the side of AOL and the rest. Once you are provisioned with the Clearinghouse you see all others that are provisioned, including AOL, ICQ and the like.
Chris - the other part of the conversation was that Volker was adding me to his buddy list using AIM (or iChat, maybe?) and in doing so should have been able to see me, had IBM had the gateway set up.
Volker - to your questions:
1. That 380k does in fact represent the number of people (IBMers and contractors) using IBM's Sametime deployment - I can't speak for who is/isn't included in there (factory workers or otherwise). Another data point that may be useful - we average a peak concurrency of around 200k users online on any given day, which I think is certainly of the same order of magnitude.
2. I'm not the one who can speak in full detail on the deployment model or schedule of our CIO's office. Would I have loved for them to have the gateway rolled out day 1? Absolutely. Are there hundreds of other marketing managers in IBM representing billions of dollars in revenue to IBM that want their products rolled out in IBM day 1? Absolutely. And as much as we all want to push them to do so, IBM's CIO's office needs to manage priorities and resources and budgets the same as any CIO office.
3. Not sure I fully get your point, but if it helps clarify, we (and beta customers/partners) did test the gateway with the external IM providers... not just chatting with ourselves inside the company :)
Chris, I wanted to add him to my AIM buddy list.
Thanks, Adam. I may have been under the impression, that installing a Sametime Gateway was quite an easy task, that does not require the CIO's attention. I was also thinking that you have a small pilot running which lets a core group of Sametime users, and you would certainly be one of them, to be connected with the public IM networks. This is why I was confused by the fact that you need to roll this out to all 380,000+ users.
On the other hand, when I looked at the requirements for the gateway, it sure looked like a solution for 380,000+ users and not one for 38 users.
Ah - I see the problem, now. You vastly overestimate my importance here :)
We did have a pilot running, and I will be added soon (very soon) - I just have been busy enough with other things that I let others play around with it pre-GA.
We looked at the requirements for the Sametime Gateway, and it appears that a DB2 installation is -required- for storage. Didnt really want to get the guys to install DB2 as well with all the attendant learning that involves. Is this really true? Why do we have to install DB2 as well?
