Blog

Blog Search

Search this site

Advertisements

Everything Else

Sponsor

Wood Watch Review

Google Custom Searches

Custom Blogger Search
Custom Sametime Search
Custom XPages Search

Subscribe

Subscribe via RSS

Recent Tweets

Hosting by

You are here: Home › Blog

Replacing IBM Connections Chat with Cisco options


Tags :


IBM and Cisco partnered together to integrate Cisco Jabber, Cisco Webex or Cisco Spark with IBM Connections. Here are some things we found in testing the integrations. Of course, we presume you have licenses for Cisco and IBM Connections.
Cisco IBM partnership
Your organization needs to choose a standard chat client and direction. You have numerous options with IBM Connections Chat including Sametime, Connections Chat and more. However, only one can be configured for all of the icons and links in the IBM Connections interface. This means the business needs to pick a product. Once ou swap the configs, the entire organization is affected for chat. If they do not have Jabber installed they could be missing communication and awareness will not be working.



Choosing a new UI/product means more overhead. Having another chat service outside of IBM Connections just means you have more work to update, install and troubleshoot. Having it all on one product is the simple approach, but you may miss function that is not offered only with IBM Connections Chat

Switching between any of them is quite simple. With a few basic requirements and a couple config lines, it is not hard to swap between what service is being used.  Keep in mind that the change affects everyone for chat features.  Meetings are a bit different.

Meetings gives you more options. You will need the URL of your organization's WebEx site to properly configure IBM Connections.  A side note is that if you want full support to include personal meetings then the WebEx id must match the IBM Connections Cloud id. Otherwise personal meetings are not an integrated option (they can still be done manually). Meetings can be deployed for everyone or some people

Our testing from there proved it to be successful and work easily.  Making everyone switch to another chat program for the testing was not fun because chat is all or nothing.  Having the option for the rich meeting environment of WebEx was appreciated by many. Jumping to another platform always frustrates someone though.