Since opening in 1962, Hendricks Regional Health has become a community service leader by its commitment to improving lives through health education and screenings, scholarships, and partnerships with other philanthropic and service agencies.  While many residents come to Hendricks Regional Health for advanced, 24/7 emergency care, the organization is also committed to caring for the community before hospital care is required.  

Efficient communication is a key component of Hendricks’ strategy to meet those commitments.  To that end, they decided to implement IBM Lotus Sametime for its real-time, presence-aware chat capabilities.  

Logging IM Traffic Via Lotus Sametime’s Default Logging Facility 

IBM ships Lotus Sametime with a default (but unsupported) logging tool that is intended to demonstrate the extensibility of Lotus Sametime’s API.  This tool essentially stores chats as text files in a designated folder on the server. 

“We used Sametime’s native tool to log chats during our proof-of-concept,” says Kimberly Kiefer, Application Development Supervisor for Hendricks Regional Health.  “Our initial intent, once our PoC demonstrated Sametime’s business value, was to extend Sametime’s native logging capabilities to create our own homegrown application to import and organize the log files.  But we quickly discovered that doing so was easier said than done.” 

After evaluating the effort required to build a chat logging solution to meet their wish list of requirements, Ms Kiefer and her team decided it simply made no sense to continue down a custom development path and “reinvent the wheel” based on an unsupported IBM tool.  They turned instead to Instant IMtegrity Archives from Instant Technologies. 

Logging IM Traffic Via a Proven and Supported Third-party Solution 

“Instant IMtegrity Archives is a better product than what we would have built, with no time spent on our part to build it,” says Ms Kiefer.   “We're actually money ahead by implementing Instant IMtegrity.”  

Hendricks’ Lotus Sametime project team was equally pleased with Instant IMtegrity’s ease of implementation.  

“The installation was super easy,” continues Ms Kiefer.  “It is literally two clicks and it installs itself—it probably took longer to download and unzip the files than it did to install.  No pain whatsoever.”  

Instant IMtegrity Archives  

Instant IMtegrity Archives provides IM archiving, search, and discovery for IBM Lotus Sametime.  Instant IMtegrity Archives captures and indexes all Lotus Sametime chats, thus helping organizations meet requirements for regulatory compliance, preservation of intellectual property, and usage policy enforcement. 

• Log and audit all Lotus Sametime conversations 
• Track who said what, what was discussed, when it was discussed, and how long the discussion lasted (including inline usage of images and emoticons) 
• Search and discover IM chats archive-wide in a central admin console 
• Enforce internal IM usage policies 
• Respond immediately to audits and electronic data discovery requests 
• Preserve intellectual property 
• Protect archives with secure Access Control Lists 
• Archives are fully indexed and easily searchable 
• Quickly search by date or by person, or do advanced searches with Boolean operations, within time frames, or over a set conversation length 
• Easily identify usage policy violations so appropriate corrective action can be taken 
• IM conversations—like email—become a usable digital asset  

The Results:  Hendricks Meets its Chat Logging Requirements Out-of-the-Box 

“I really see Instant IMtegrity as a positive since we are able to log, search, and report on chat sessions,” says Ms Kiefer.  “We can also set alerts based on specific events or keywords used in chat messages to flag possible misuse of our Lotus Sametime environment.”  

Instant IMtegrity’s robust features are just part of the story; responsive, knowledgeable customer support is equally as important.  

“The team at Instant Technologies was happy to work with us throughout our implementation and testing,” concludes Ms Kiefer.  “Their willingness to provide assistance during our evaluation period, and to go the extra mile to learn and understand our unique software usage model, showed us they are committed to their product and believe in its value.”