Having trouble trying to decide what type of clients to roll out to your environment?

I’d like to try and help make your decision a bit easier…

As I am sure you already know, both clients are essentially the same. The embedded Sametime client (ESC) in Notes (a.k.a the Sametime Contacts plugin) is based off the same source code that the stand-alone client (SAC) uses but is just packaged differently.

There has been some confusion as to whether or not there is any disparity in the set of features provided by both clients, but the reality is that BOTH clients, ESC & SAC, offers MOSTLY the same set of features. As of today, there are some feature gaps with the ESC (for example, the ESC does not contain the Primary Buddies or the Office integration features), but in general, the main set of features is consistent between the two clients.

This article describes the key differences in available features between the two clients from ONLY an entitlement perspective:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/notesanddomino/sametimeentitlement.html

From a technical perspective, both clients provide the same set of features minus the ones mentioned above.

OK, so both clients provide pretty much the same set of features… so now what? In most cases, it should be a fairly easy decision:

If you have Notes clients deployed in the environment or plan to, my recommendation is to use the Notes embedded client. You can have the same set of features without having to load two separate applications. That’s the whole point of having the embedded Sametime client.

For all other environments, where Notes is not planned for deployment, then deploy the full stand-alone Sametime client.

Hope this helps