Sametime 8 Gateway and the LDAP Configuration wizard

There are a number of things I wanted to blog about this week, but it has been a busy week upgrading our Sametime 7.5.1 Gateway to 8.0, and building a Lotus Connections pilot environment.   I will try to get to some of the other topics, but for now I want to cover briefly one of the enhancements in the 8.0 Gateway which is the LDAP Configuration Wizard.  In the Sametime 7.5.1 Gateway you had to follow this 35 step process to configure the Gateway to use your LDAP.  Sametime 8.0 you simply complete the wizard during install and it is done for you. Now you tell me which one would you prefer the 35 step process or 3 screen wizard? One other nice feature in the 8.0 Gateway is that the status for each community is now displayed, so you have a visual indicator if a community is completely down. The upgrade was fairly smooth, we are still working our some issues with connectivity that are left over from 7.5.1.  Once we have it all connected we will then have to see how the stability is over time.  In 7.5.1 a week was about the limit then awareness was spotty until the gateway was restarted.  8.0 is supposed to contain improvements in connectivity that should let us keep the gateway up for longer.