Book Review: IBM Lotus Sametime 8 Essentials - A User’s Guide
Tags :book review Sametime IM instant messaging Lotus
I am taking a non-biased approach to the book review, knowing both of the incredible authors Marie "CrashTestChix" Scott and Tom "Duffbert" Duff.
The book, IBM Lotus Sametime 8 Essentials: A User's Guide is written for users, just as the title suggests. While some edges of administraiton are hit for purely reference points, they do a great job of telling users to call their Sametime administrators for questions and items beyond the scope of the book. The book is hefty for a user at 284 pages and $40 USD (at time of writing). But if you want "soup to nuts" information on the Sametime client in your users hands, this is it. Even as an administrator you learn quite a few tips and tricks on the UI side you did not know existed.
The screenshots and attention to detail makes it almost a show and tell type scenario for implementing anything the authors discuss and suggest. Sametime is a large product between chat, communities, external contacts, Advanced, meetings and even integration with the Notes client. Tom and Marie conquer it all breaking each part into it's own chapter. They build upon previous chapters well and slowly move the user experience into productivity and not just bells and whistles. This is what makes their style together work.
Explaining what a community is, who authentication and login works and variations in usernames is beneficial to an end user that will read this. Something most end users books do not take into account. I also appreciate how they taught buddy list name lookup and management to get users chatting right away once they are connected.
I honestly wished they had included two things. One, I hoped that they would have chosen the native Sametime Connect for Blackberry instead of Enterprise Messenger, but that is a personal preference. Two, that they had touched on the plain text integrated chat that shows in the basic client as numerous enterprises still use this as their chat client due to licensing or running Notes (even 8.x and higher) in Basic mode.
This is the only book on this topic and no other will come close. They have set the bar high for any end user guide in the Lotus software community. When they wake up, I hope they prepare for another round of writing.
Disclosure: Packt Publishing sent me a free ebook copy wit no review guarantees and I was a reviewer for a couple chapters (of course those chapters rock too). The links directly to the book are Amazon affiliate links.
blog comments powered by Disqus
On Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 by Chris Miller
