Administrators are often too busy putting out fires to check systems on a regular basis. You can extend IBM Lotus Sametime's capabilities to notify administrators and monitor, test, and debug your system by creating bots with the IBM Lotus Sametime Toolkit. IBM Lotus Sametime bots can help reduce calls to the help desk, shorten system outages, and accelerate problem resolution.

I'll explore ways that you can use bots to monitor your system and alert administrators of problems that would normally take multiple calls to the help desk to identify. I'll also explain how you can use bots to better test system fixes before deploying them to production. You can use these same bots to reproduce a problem that you would otherwise have to recreate by debugging the production servers and waiting for the next occurrence.

Then to illustrate how simple applications can support end users' high availability demands, I'll provide and explain code samples for an Awareness bot that monitors awareness between users and tests instant messaging (IMing) functionality. Lastly, I'll present some future design points for the Awareness bot that are on my workspace now that use IBM Lotus Sametime in a new way.