IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced — which IBM introduced with Sametime 8.0 — enables the sharing of knowledge and information in real time with tools such as instant share, persistent chat, and Skill Tap. To provide these collaboration tools, a successful deployment of Sametime Advanced requires many different components. Determining how all of these components best work together can be complicated.

To help administrators, architects, and IT managers successfully deploy Sametime Advanced, we’ll first explore the components that comprise Sametime Advanced — including what each contributes to the installation. After a discussion of common deployment scenarios, we’ll dive headlong into best practices and lessons learned from our experiences planning Sametime Advanced server deployments in enterprise environments. Although you can install Sametime Advanced on Linux, the focus of this article is on a Microsoft Windows-based installation.

This article is essentially a field guide to supplement the IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced 8.0.1 Information Center. It provides additional tips and best practices that we found very helpful during our Sametime Advanced deployment planning. In keeping with the spirit of a field guide, we include a table of required inputs that you should bring to any Sametime Advanced installation. These best practices were developed with Sametime Advanced 8.0.1 and 8.0.2; however, the concepts are applicable to Sametime Advanced 8.0 as well.

After reading this article, you should be more aware of the functionality and benefits of Sametime Advanced, as well as better prepared to design and deploy a production-ready Sametime Advanced infrastructure.