I’ve spent the last week in all-day meetings … which is (not) exactly the thing I want to do as I try to wrap up a year early to go visit family over the holidays. I’ll post more about those meetings later because they really were interesting.

However, during the meetings I was surprised to see how many people left the room with their PC (and yes, it was always a Windows PC) wide open for all to hack upon. People would leave for lunch, or worse, for the rest of the day, leaving their entire computer logged in and open to the world.

As an IT department, we have not yet enabled (forced) settings to prevent this (but it is on the schedule for 2008). After the first meeting day, I made a comment about it to the group and didn’t get much more than a (less than heart-felt) “yeah, we shouldn’t do that.”

By day three, I couldn’t help prove my point. On the laptop (of a good friend of mine) I decided to use the open machine to make a few adjustments, or customizations:

As you can see, hiding his “start” bar, adding a Mac background and increasing the size of his scrollbars (which is found DEEP in display properties) left his computer just anoying enough to get my point acrossed.

Amazingly enough, everyone started locking their computers (or taking their computers with them) after that!

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Over the weekend, I got an email from IBM stating that Sametime 8 was now available … and that INCLUDES the Mac client. WOOHOO!!!

I’ve installed it on my Mac and its very nicely done. It really feels like a big improvement from the previous version. I then fired up Parallels to load it into my Windows environment. It was at that moment I realized I needed to do some more research on the new versions/flavors of Sametime. So I called my IBM/Lotus rep, who’s still working on getting me an answer to “what each version of Sametime exactly does” compared to the others.

She did send me a link to a blog with some good Sametime information. That’s helpful, but what I was really looking for was a table that showed each version of Sametime and what features are available across those versions. Apparently, this doesn’t exist (or else I assume she would have sent it by now).

What I did find was this graphical representation of what I was asking for:

This is a GREAT graphic, but I’m not sure what it means. I’m trying to figure it out based on the graphics, but stuff like the plug icon still confuses me. Does Sametime Standard 8 require A/C power?

Meanwhile, the other big mystery I’m trying to solve is how this integrates with our Cisco network. I know it does, I just don’t know HOW. When I find out, I’ll let you know. In the mean time, the visions of seeing my Sametime contact list with icons showing if a person is on-line and on the phone; and then being able to click-to-call them without having to look up a phone number — are very, very cool visions that I can’t wait to make happen. It’ll allow us to get ahold of people so much more effectively and easily, especially the mobile workers that are rarely in their “home” office location.

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