Using LotusLive for Sametime – 2 months in

I previously wrote about how we shutdown our Sametime servers and moved to LotusLive for Sametime (“Why we shutdown our Sametime servers“). About 2 months after making the switch I thought it was a good time to sum to the experience and whether it’s a move we’re happy with.

There’s nothing to be said about performance or uptime which has been flawless. Users are happily chatting away and the worries that some had about being available for customer chat in off hours (because we are now in the same community as customers and partners) hasn’t been a problem. Whether it’s really not a problem or whether customers and partners haven’t found us to LotusLive is unclear. Only thing I’ve heard from users is that it’s a real pain no longer having public groups to help them maintain their buddylist. Previously many used public groups such as “Sales” or “Developers” to automatically maintain their buddylist but the concept of public, shared, groups are not available in LotusLive. That’s a real shame. Same goes for LotusLive meetings which has taken over from Sametime meetings without any issues at all.

All in all I haven’t heard anything from users that would make us want to go back to running our own Sametime environment.

Now from the technical side of fence I find the lack of groups really annoying. I also find the fact that file transfer isn’t allowed by policy annoying and frustrating. Using Sametime as a quick way to move a file between colleagues was really nice and having to resort to drives or e-mail is so 1990’s… As a LotusLive (Engage) customer

I’m also finding that lack of tools for automated user management (creation, modify, deletion) irritating and frustrating. I’ve heard about a LDAP sync tool or using TDI but not something I have found solid information on. The tools might be there and but they’re hardly easy to find or come by from my point of view. The result is that we have to manually make sure that users update their profile with current information which is time consuming and far from ideal.

In conclusion however…

Despite all this I still find that the move was a good one and I’m hoping that some of the above can be solved in the near future. I have a list of LotusLive questions lined up for Lotusphere 2011 so if you’re in the developer lab and know something about LotusLive I want to talk to you.