IBM/Lotus on Monday unveiled client upgrades to its real-time communications and collaboration platform that tie into Microsoft software and third-party mobile devices.

The company said that with Sametime 7.5 users will be able to launch real-time communication sessions from within Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client. The company also announced support for RIM, Nokia and Windows Mobile devices.

The client improvements are slated to ship later this year and early in 2007.

IBM’s announcement comes the same day rival Microsoft is holding a daylong conference in San Francisco to lay out the roadmap for its Unified Communications strategy.

“Companies are starting to get the concept of contextual collaboration,” says David Marshak, senior product manager for IBM/Lotus. “The buddy list is certainly one place to collaborate, along with e-mail, the Web site, the portal. But now users can go into documents and see if authors are online or if the people listed in a spreadsheet are online. You can start chatting, use voice over IP or anything you can do through Sametime.”

From Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Sametime users can send an instant message, initiate a VoIP call, share an application or launch a Web conference. From within Outlook, Microsoft’s e-mail client, users can see who is online, schedule a Web conference from their calendars and access all of Sametime’s capabilities, including Web conferencing.

IBM is using Microsoft’s Smart Tags technology to integration with the Office applications.

IBM announced in January it would make client-side improvements in mid-2006, but experts say improvements also are needed on the server side, where IBM has focused on scalability and reliability. IBM/Lotus plans to release the Real-Time Collaboration Gateway later this year to foster IM integration with AOL, Yahoo and Google.

The gateway will translate Sametime’s native Virtual Places (VP) protocol to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE). The gateway also will support translation to the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), which is the protocol used by Jabber and Google Talk.

IBM also said Sametime 7.5 would be built on the Eclipse framework so developers would have an open programming model for developing real-time communications applications.