Someone on our Sametime exam team questioned this this morning and I realised it definitely needs to be publicly called out. The Sametime 9 Community Server no longer has any stpolicy.nsf database or a policies view under the old school web based admin. If you upgrade to Sametime 9 you must install the system console (and db2) to be able to manage and maintain policies going forward.
Something for your planning…
The Turtle Partnership Blog 
And classic meetings. I have had it asked can they still use old style meetings to avoid Websphere. No
I’m hurt you don’t read my blog Mr Miller - I had that on my Pt 1 🙂
I do read it, but Part 1 was a very long article and easily missed for everyone
I would personally have no issues if they dropped the community server from Domino and went 100% websphere based.
There are so many products that you can deploy on various j2ee container using nearly any database that a mandatory websphere / db2 requirement (in many cases tied to a certain release) looks quite ancient to me.
I don’t know if Sametime is successful in the market or not. If it is, IBM is doing it right and I just don’t get it. To be honest I have never seen a Sametime installation without Domino (which just proves that my own world is very, very small).
In some ways, I agree with Declan - definitely think that they should be going 100% WAS to help avoid confusion and progress. And how many times in the past have we seen Sametime continue running when the underlying Domino has crashed? 🙂
Also, I like this move to get rid of stpolicy.nsf. I know I have seen cases where everything is properly federated into the SSC but it seems that it isn’t reflected in stpolicy.nsf and then Sametime forgets about the change.
I also wish that changes, such as trusted IP’s, would be immediate. I recall one of the early releases of SSC that I was happy when I made a change with a Trusted IP and it was immediately in effect without restarting ST and/or Domino. But then with the next MR, IBM “fixed” this as a bug. 😉