Overview

Lotus Sametime^® Unified Telephony is unified communications middleware which integrates telephony across multivendor Public Branch Exchange (PBX) systems and provides a unified end user experience, including integrated softphones; phone and IM presence awareness; and call management and call control across multiple communications systems.

Enterprises need to deliver products and services faster to enhance customer service and speed decision making. Companies are finding that a key to improving productivity and business responsiveness is delivering communication and collaboration tools in a consistent and meaningful context. By integrating telephony into the company's greater communications platform, decision making and handling business processes are accelerated. The telephony integration allows person-to-person as well as multi-person interaction.

IBM® Lotus® Sametime®Unified Telephony software offers the immediacy of instant messaging with telephone capabilities on users' desktops, so that users can find, reach, and collaborate with one another more effectively. Telephony features with integrated presence awareness, softphones, call control, and rules-based call management can be used with a wide variety of telephone systems. The middleware layer of Unified Telephony software provides connectivity to multiple telephone systems – both IP private branch exchange (PBX) and legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) systems – independent of the enterprise's telephony infrastructure or migration to IP telephony.


Component overview

These are the the components that make up the IBM® Lotus® Sametime® Unified Telephony product including servers, clients, and external telephony equipment.

The following graphic shows the various components and how they work together.








Components

The major components are discussed in separate topics:

* Telephony Application Server
* The Media Server
* Telephony Control Server

Lotus Sametime Standard Server

IBM Lotus Sametime Standard server lets a community of users to collaborate in real-time activities such as online meetings, presence, chat, and VoIP over and intranet or the Internet.
Lotus Sametime Connect Client

The Lotus Sametime Connect client is the end-user client for letting community users collaborate in real-time activities: presence, chat, and VoIP over an intranet or the Internet.
External Telephony Equipment

* IP PBX – The business telephone system that delivers voice over a data network and interacts with the normal public switched telephone networks (PSTN).
* PSTN – The network of the world's public circuit switched telephone networks.
* Telephony Gateway – A telecommunications network node that can interface with another network that uses different protocols.

* Telephony Application Server
The Telephony Application Server provides telephony services to the Sametime Unified Telephony users through the Sametime Connect client. The Telephony Application Server interfaces with Sametime Community server, enterprise directory, and Telephony Control Servers.
* Media Server overview
The Media Server is an application that is installed on to the Telephony Application Server and integrates into the Telephone Control Server Framework. The Media Server can be installed on its own hardware. The more dedicated the hardware, the better the Media Server performance.
* Telephony Control Server
The Telephony Control Server is responsible for receiving incoming requests. The Telephony Control Server also provides the unified number service and handles all incoming call routing for the unified number. The Telephony Control Server container is a back-to-back user agent (B2BUA) with a PBX abstraction layer that allows it to work with Telephony Application Server.









Infrastructure

Description	Type	Model	Operating System	CPU's	CPU Speed	CPU Type	Memory	Comments
LDAP Server1	X series	x3550- 7978AC1	Windows 2003 sp2	4	3.00 ghz	Intel Xeon	4 GB	IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6.1
ST Community Server	X series	3550	Windows Server 2003 SP 2	1	2.33 ghz	Intel Xeon	8 GB	Primary Node. 1 cluster member
TAS	X Series	x3455-7984AC1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	4	3 ghz	AMD Opteron	8 GB
TCS1	X series	3650 T -798053x	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	4	3.20 ghz	Intel Xeon	4 GB
TCS2	X series	3650 T	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	4	3.20 ghz	Intel Xeon	4 GB