IBM Sametime Unified Telephony

Presence and telephony awareness, unified phone numbers and incoming call management

• Show at a glance whether it is appropriate to start a conversation now by providing telephony status indicators (showing on the phone or off the phone) and online presence information.
• Provide colleagues with your single unified phone number that allows callers to reach you regardless of your current location.
• Easily set rules based on caller, time of day, status and location to route your calls, such as to redirect a call to a mobile phone after work hours. You can also set your preferred device based on your availability and location status, or route calls to an alternative device if the first device is not answered.

Softphone, click-to-call, click-to-conference and call control features

• Initiate and manage phone calls through a feature-rich telephony client using your preferred device. The client includes the IBM Sametime softphone that uses the computer's built-in microphone and speakers, a USB speakerphone or a headset.
• Take advantage of your company’s network and telephony infrastructure to easily make and receive calls from virtually wherever you are, so that you can reduce international or roaming fees and use your company's existing least-cost routing.
• Initiate a call or audio conference through a PBX telephone system by selecting one or multiple names from the contact list. Or if you are collaborating with instant messaging (IM) and decide to escalate from IM to a call or audio conference, use the click-to-call, click-to-conference capability—with intelligent name and number recognition inside the text chat window or chat history to speed that transition.
• Use call control capabilities to: click-to-call and click-to-conference; accept, reject or redirect an incoming call; transfer or forward a call; raise or lower volume; mute or unmute calls; move an active call to another device; merge calls; hold and resume calls; and disconnect calls.
• Use multi-way call features to enable moderators to mute one or all participants; lock calls; invite others to a call; and end calls for everyone.

IBM Sametime Unified Telephony dialer on Apple iOS and Google Android devices

• Use the IBM Sametime Unified Telephony dialer included in the IBM Sametime client for Apple iPhone and iPad and Android devices to initiate outgoing voice calls with your IBM Sametime Unified Telephony number. When IBM Sametime Unified Telephony software initiates an incoming call to your mobile phone, the outgoing caller ID will display your unified number.
• Override your default call routing rule directly from your iPhone, iPad or Android device.
• Specify an alternative device, such as a local landline or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone, to use when initiating voice calls using IBM Sametime Unified Telephony. The software can initiate a call to the alternative device instead of your mobile phone, which helps further reduce international long distance and roaming charges.

A simple, consistent user communications experience on the desktop client

• Access and manage communications from a single IBM Sametime or IBM Lotus Notes® client; a Microsoft® Outlook, Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Office application; or an enterprise application—whichever is your preferred work style.
• Easily move from an instant message to a call or conference.
• Provide a consistent user experience and set of functions independent of the phone system to which users are connected. This is in contrast to other offerings that provide a softphone that works only with a specific vendor’s PBX and may require full migration to IP telephony before delivering a common set of UC capabilities to users.

A unified communications platform

• Let the back-end middleware layer of IBM Sametime Unified Telephony software mask the complexity of back-end integration by providing connectivity to multiple telephone systems, so you can provide UC functionality without removing and replacing existing phone systems. The software connects through Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to SIP-compliant PBXs from multiple vendors using SIP, and it connects to legacy TDM phone systems through SIP gateways.
• Reduce or eliminate the need for desk phone expenditures and home office lines by providing softphones to remote and office workers.
• Provide high availability of call control services, scaling to hundreds or hundreds of thousands of users, and optimize system performance with clustering and load-balancing features.
• Configure, monitor and manage deployment using a single administration console that can check server status, monitor call volume and call activity, manage license usage, and view and edit SIP proxy properties.
• Use IBM Sametime client plug-ins and software development kits to make IBM Sametime Unified Telephony capabilities available within applications to help speed business processes.