IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway lets you connect your IBM Lotus Sametime instant messaging community with external communities, including other Lotus Sametime and public instant messaging communities, such as AOL?, AIM?, ICQ?, and Apple? iChat? as well as Google Talk service (available today) and the Yahoo Messenger community (available soon). Lotus Sametime Gateway provides server-to-server interoperability between disparate communities with conversion services for different protocols, presence awareness, and instant messaging. You can connect your Lotus Sametime community to AOL through the IBM Lotus Sametime Provisioning Application (see the following section for more details). Lotus Sametime Gateway replaces the Lotus Sametime Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Gateway from earlier releases of Lotus Sametime
How it works

When Lotus Sametime Gateway receives an instant message, it validates the legitimacy of the message. If the message is valid, the gateway translates the message protocol, if necessary, and forwards the message to the recipient. In addition to instant messaging, Lotus Sametime Gateway has presence awareness, blacklisted domain filters, user access control, and event logging.

Lotus Sametime Gateway is a platform based on IBM WebSphere Application Server, which provides failover, clustering, and scalability for your Lotus Sametime Gateway deployment. WebSphere Application Server V6.1 is part of the Lotus Sametime Gateway installation package. Protocol connectors allow your instant messaging community to connect with other communities. Lotus Sametime Gateway ships with several protocol connectors, including a SIP connector that works with AOL and an External Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) connector that works with Google Talk, so you can connect with other communities right out-of-the-box. You can add more protocol connectors to Lotus Sametime Gateway to extend your community even further.