Planning client upgrades

Review interoperability considerations for an IBM® Sametime® deployment that includes both older clients and the newest clients.

If you are planning a phased approach to upgrading clients, you will have a mix of clients running different releases of Sametime in the same organization. Sametime supports older clients as well as the newest clients, but some features might not be available to older clients. In particular, you should be aware of the following considerations when your deployment includes clients from older versions of Sametime:

Conference room considerations
  • Room Provisioning: Older clients will not be explicitly provisioned with a conference room. If a version 8.5.2 client is the moderator in a meeting, then the default conference template (using the default audio/video policy) will be used for that meeting.
  • Media Encryption: This setting will be read from the value of "EncrytionType" in the stavconfig.xml file; the default value is SRTP.
  • Conference Mode: The version 8.5.2 client can join a conference only if the Conference Mode set in the default Conference Template is "Mixed SVC + AVC".
  • NAT Traversal: ICE Token Authentication should be disabled when your Sametime deployment includes 8.5.2 clients.
  • Default Codec: The codecs G.7221 (audio) and H264 (video) are selected by default for version 8.5.2 clients.
General compatibility considerations
  • Policies: New policies will not be applied to older clients.
  • Line Rate: This setting uses the value of the "maxVideoBitRate" setting from the video resolution (av.videoresolution) policy.
  • Encryption (av.encryptionType): The older client will read the value from the stavconfig.xml file and the Sametime 9 client will read the value from the Media Manager policy. If the Sametime 9 client is connecting to a Sametime 8.5.2x server, the encryption setting will not be available from the Media Manager policy, so it will fall back to the value set in the stavconfig.xml file.
  • SVC Disabled: The Sametime 9 client participating in an audio/video conference that is hosted on a Sametime 8.5.2x server will join the conference as an AVC endpoint.