I got a call from my office last night: “Hey, we got it working! Sametime, with video and audio … its working!”

Quite exciting news for sure! We are on the cusp of sending many people to China over the next few months in support of launching our new facility there … so the ability to have Sametime with audio/video at the desktop level is quite appealing. I’ve seen $900 cell phone bills (one person, one week) from persons who have visited China; and everyone seems to return with a $9 camera and Skype on their system… which if fine, except its hard to keep track of user names with that. Oh, and no one can read what the camera’s driver disk is doing … since its all in Chinese.

So the idea of having our Sametime Clients now support audio and video over the web is very cool and already lots of people have signed up for a client license of this tool.

Being selfish for a moment … I knew the Sametime Client was mainly a Windows thing. I can’t seem to find any way for my Parallels instance to pick up the built-in iSight camera (or microphone for that matter) to allow Windows to use these devices.

So I thought I’d check out our Sametime site, to see if, by very unusual chance, there was a Mac version of the client on it. — Notsomuch. But what really hurt was seeing that there IS a Linux version of the client! DOH!

And yes, if we all had Macs, then we could use iSight and iChat to have uber-cool conferences. But we don’t … yet.