My employer uses Lotus Sametime as our internal IM service. This is great—instant messaging is a great enabler for various low-bandwidth work conversations. Until today, I could also use it for occasional personal conversations over AIM—coordinating dinner plans with my husband, or saying hello to a former colleague who has left. Today, I got an email asking me to update to Sametime 7.5.1. Since it also said that the current version was going to stop working in a couple weeks, I downloaded it and upgraded. It’s fine—but the AIM functionality is disabled. IBM’s documentation says Sametime supports AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk, but it’s disabled by default. Therefore, I can’t tell whether this is a policy change on the part of my employer (possible) or poor configuration management
Either way, I’m annoyed. It would be one thing to have functionality removed (I went through that before, when the firewall started blocking SSH), but advertising an upgrade without mentioning that it removes a feature is poor practice.
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