As a part of HCL Digital Week, Luis and Gini presented the HCL Sametime Premium. It is intuitive, easy to use and frankly everything what we want from a modern video conferencing solution and more. The emphasis is put on cost savings, according to HCL you can save, for ten thousand users, over a million us dollars annually! In the following I will write a brief summary of the session, along with a few thoughts of my own.
According to HCL, when deploying video conferencing software, the customers are met with the following problems:
These problems are tackled with the HCL Sametime Premium.
As mentioned, a lot of emphasis is set on cost savings. The amount of money that HCL Sametime Premium can help you save, just blew me away, amazing! Take a look at the following slide.
I like it that we still decide where we can deploy the solution, not like at some other software vendors…
HCL Sametime Premium and Sametime v11.5 offers a lot of new functionality, the following slide does not represent the full set of features, just the most important functionality at a glance.
Luis also showed us a very cool demo with Sametime Premium, mostly Meetings, in action. You can create new Sametime Meetings in HCL Notes, or in HCL Nomad Web client, no problem.
All functions are intuitive and easy to access, like screen sharing.
YouTube video sharing, as well as streaming on YouTube is available out of the box! I personally really like this feature.
The transition to mobile devices is easy and seamless.
By the way, you can install the mobile app via QR-Code, you just need to enter your username and password and you are ready to go. This is a welcome addition, I always wanted to spare the user of typing the server name and other needed settings.
This is how a meeting can be created via web client.
Another cool thing is that the meeting recording is available just seconds after ending the recording of a meeting.
Luis also showed us that you can deploy HCL Sametime Premium, with all features, in a day! Including setting up AWS, or doing some other preparation work on your platform of choice. To help us gain knowledge on how to do this, HCL will publish some new Whitepapers.
HCL Sametime 11.5 including Meetings is available for download today, including a calculator tool to help you leverage just how much money you can save with HCL Sametime Premium.
All in all Sametime Premium and/or Meetings is a very welcome addition, there are so many customers waiting for Sametime Meetings. I hope that we are going to use HCL Sametime in many of our future projects. In the end always remember:
Thoughts about HCL Connections, Domino and Sametime 