IBM Israel Software Lab (ILSL)

The IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway - a platform for presence and real-time communication interoperability.

The Sametime Gateway is an extensible platform that allows real-time collaboration (RTC) communities (such as Sametime and public IM services - AOL, Yahoo, and Google Talk) to share presence and interact with each other. The Sametime Gateway receives messages from one or more communities, checks their legitimacy, translates them if necessary, and forwards them to their destination. The Gateway provides for inter-domain connectivity and coexistence between RTC communities, as well as protocol translation if required. Connecting two or more communities imposes several requirements on their management . This includes policy enforcement requirements, privacy requirements, logging requirements and more. The platform will be delivered with out-of-the-box functionality, such as specific RTC services, protocol translations, and logging and statistics. A plug-in technology will allow third-parties to enrich and customize the functionality.