Sametime v10 - Technology Changes Galore

Sametime v10 Limited Use shipped last week and later on this week I’ll be posting a step by step guide to my install but for now I wanted to talk about the technology changes that it brings. This release focuses only on the Community server elements, the other components such as Meetings will be part of the v11 version which is due to be released along with Domino v11 towards the end of 2019.

My thanks to Mat Newman who posted this updated roadmap on his blog where he also shares more detail about the licensing

“Entitlement” is part of your Notes licensing and enables you to use the chat features of Sametime inside the Notes client, the browser mail cilent , a web client and the standalone mobile client.

The largest changes for the clients in v10 are the support for persistent chat (and chat history) across multiple devices, an improved conversation UI, a new lightweight web client, and the removal of the System Console as a requirement for the Community server install.  Those are all great changes that justify an upgrade to your existing Community servers by themselves.

Starting with the biggest technology change, the System Console (which itself required WebSphere and DB2) is now optional and it is possible to install and manage a Community server entirely on Domino. However if you want to use either the browser client or mobile client you will need to still install the Sametime Proxy server which does still require WebSphere and DB2.

To maintain the persistent chat across devices, a server-side storage solution is required and in this release it is MongoDB.  HCL have committed to replacing that in v11 and having a data migration solution out of Mongo so it’s a temporary solution.

You may have heard that Sametime 10 will be 64 bit only on Domino but in fact this first version still requires Domino 32bit and at least 9.0.1 FP10 version.  Domino 10 is 64bit only so right now Sametime 10 cannot be installed on Domino 10.  That does however make it suitable for an in-place upgrade to your existing servers which will already be on 32bit Domino.  This is still very early in the release and the technical requirements are not yet published but will eventually be here .

Last week HCL hosted a webcast where they introduced Sametime v10 and answered questions, I’d recommend looking at the Q&A and watching the webcast here

I have been documenting my own install this weekend - I opted for an in-place upgrade as I assume that’s what the majority of people will be doing on this release, and will be publishing that in the next couple of days.