Is instant messaging a curse or a boon for the office environment?

Instant messaging (IM) first became popular in the form of buddy lists and chat rooms on AOL. IM has been available on AOL since the company offered buddy lists to its paying users in 1996. Also in 1996, an Israeli startup called Mirabilis launched a free IM service called ICQ (I seek you). In 1998, AOL decided to launch its own free service and to buy Mirabilis.

The Gartner Group predicts that by 2004, 60 percent of real-time communication—including voice, text, or call-and-response—will be driven by IM technology.

Already, industry experts estimate that over 200 million people use IM, and pundits expect that number to reach 500 million by 2006. It’s catching on in the corporate environment as technology planners recognise the potential for enabling faster communication and creating more opportunities for ad hoc discussions between employees and external partners. The application becomes even more powerful when combined with features like document sharing, whiteboarding, and graphics.

Yet quite a few enterprises are still either blocking access to external IM services due to security concerns, or they don’t have an internal infrastructure to support the technology.

What’s the business use?
If you consider the implications that instant messaging (IM) has for your business, you’ll find that it offers great potential for improving communication between employees and customers alike.

However, once you’ve decided that IM has a place in your business, you face the difficult decision of choosing which IM solution to use. They are not all created equal, and many of the systems don’t play well with each other—at least for now.

One option is to set up your own internal IM solution using one of the packages detailed here. Of course, this isn’t always feasible, particularly for smaller businesses with a limited budget. A second option is to use a public IM provider, which offers the advantage of being inexpensive to implement and gives you the opportunity to begin taking advantage of IM without investing in new hardware or server software.

The security scenario
The same corporate tech planners who recognise the need and benefits of IM cite the lack of security as a critical factor in preventing it from being successful in a corporate environment.

Microsoft researchers estimate that over 30 percent of businesses now use some form of insecure IM capability. Research firm IDC estimates that 70 percent of corporate employees use either business IM or consumer IM services for work-related activities. Still, e-mail remains the only consistent, reliable, secure collaborative tool for most enterprises. But that will change in the next 12 months.

Before corporations make the decision to use IM regularly, they need secure, archivable, and auditable real-time capabilities. Current IM products from AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo are easily hacked. The intellectual property generated by conversations that take place over these channels may not be automatically saved. And without the ability to audit the services, companies have no way of managing the flow of information and protecting trade secrets from escaping through the IM channels.

IBM recently shipped new copies of its enterprise-class IM products, Sametime and QuickPlace. And third-party vendors, including IMlogic and FaceTime Communications, offer add-on products that promise to increase the security and archiving capabilities in current IM implementations.

FaceTime recently announced support for MSN Messenger, giving Microsoft a source for tools that will help customers protect their investment in the use of Microsoft IM networks. The agreement between Microsoft and FaceTime will allow IT pros to deploy strategic IM business applications.

The next-generation IM
Microsoft believes that the most reliable way to present IM as an enterprise-class collaboration platform is to base it on new security features planned for Windows .NET Server and Titanium, the next release of Exchange.

Microsoft has a new initiative, Greenwich, which is designed to include both presence and IM capabilities in the base operating system. Microsoft announced at its recent Exchange conference that it would be decoupling IM from its conferencing server product and moving it into the base operating system next year. Once delivered, Greenwich will allow developers to build applications that use presence information to deliver IM, voice, video, and data sharing collaboration applications in the enterprise.

AOL and Yahoo! also plan to release corporate versions of their popular Instant Messaging products that include encryption and IT administration capabilities.

But IBM clearly isn’t sitting on the sidelines while Microsoft and AOL move to make IM capabilities ubiquitous. IBM is working to integrate its existing Sametime and QuickPlace collaboration tools with its WebSphere architecture. Although AOL has more AIM/ICQ users today than other IM vendors, they’re mostly consumer users. Corporate users are much more likely to adopt a real-time communications platform that has a development platform directly tied to it—either Microsoft’s .NET platform or IBM’s J2EE-based WebSphere platform.

The emergence of IM standards

Of course, AOL has been mandated by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open its AIM system to communicate with rival systems as a condition of approving its merger with Time Warner. AOL has continued to complain about the difficulties of making IM transparent but has nevertheless knuckled down and made some progress, initially working with IBM to test interconnectivity with Lotus SameTime.

The industry is moving toward a common standard called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). A related protocol, SIMPLE, (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) is getting wide vendor support. IBM's Sametime already uses SIP, and Microsoft has pledged future support for SIMPLE in its Greenwich products.

As the industry coalesces around accepted standards, developers will be able to write applications and code business processes that use presence and real-time communications sessions. The end result is that real-time collaborative activities will be integrated into standard business processes just as postal mail, the telephone, the fax, and e-mail have been.

While the industry sorts out interoperability issues, many users have taken matters into their own hands, and use multiple IM clients simultaneously. There are also a variety of applications which will let you interact simultaneously with AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger users, as well as many others:

• Trillian
• Eyeball Chat
• Gaim
• Jabber
• Proteus

Cloudswell SCIM Enterprise Server
SCIM stands for Secure Cryptographic Instant Messenger, and one can hardly disagree with the nameââ,¬"the system supports 1024-bit encryption between the clients and the server. This application leans more toward the chat style of IM in that users can't leave messages on the server for users who are offline.

The SCIM client is very simple to install, though in the review version it is distributed as an executable that is locked to a server at a specific IP address. The client is limited to plain text, but it is fairly easy to use once you get the hang of what all the buttons do. The client is written in Java, so it can be made to work on just about any device or operating system with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

The SCIM Server is a bit more complicated, requiring Windows 2000 Server SP3, Sun Java 2, MySQL database, and PHP Extensions for IIS. The Java, MySQL, and PHP components are all free and provided on the installation CD.

Install documentation is very detailed, but the installation process seems needlessly complex and requires each package to be installed and configured separately.

The server is administered using PHP pages via a Web browser, and these are generally very easy to use. We had a couple of problems importing the data from Active Directory on our server, as it grabbed the wrong field for the user name, and we were unable to add users directly from the admin pages, but the add user feature direct from the client worked perfectly.

This looks like a very good secure, interoperable, and clean system, but it needs a bit of work on the installation process. Once you have it running there is no problem, though it would be nice if it could draw its user database directly and interactively from a corporate source (LDAP, Active Directory, etc.).

IBM Lotus Sametime 3.1
IBM/Lotus' Sametime server runs on the Domino groupware platform, which provides the base for the system install. Domino is a complex system for the novice to install, but if you are already running Lotus Notes, you are almost there. If you are new to the Lotus suite of products, you may find the system a little strange at first, but the Domino package is a powerful base for a variety of groupware applications.

The great advantage of Domino is its extensibility. You can use Notes for e-mail, Domino.Doc for document management, Workflow for business management, and Sametime for messaging. You can even write your own business applications.

Sametime provides a simple interface to communicate within your organisation. You can schedule a meeting or have an ad-hoc get together, share your screen or programs, edit shared files, and deliver online presentations. There is even the option to connect to a WebSphere Translation Server so that language barriers can be broken down.

SameTime provides several extensions to allow even greater access to messaging on the move. The Sametime SIP Gateway supports SIMPLE. As other instant messaging vendors such as AOL and Microsoft begin to support SIMPLE, you will be able to connect your Sametime community with third-party SIP-enabled communities. IBM also offers SameTime Every Place (STEP), which provides WAP connectivity.

Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server
Microsoft's Instant Messaging Server is a part of the Exchange Server 2000 package. One of the (many) options you have when you install Exchange is the Instant Messaging Service, which provides the ability for the server to act as an Instant Messaging Home Server, Instant Messaging Router, or both. A Home Server is used to house users, while a Router is used to send messages off to other servers.

You can setup the instant messaging server as intranet only or Internet capable.

Microsoft's IM Client is of course the ubiquitous MSN Messenger, installed with just about every Windows desktop on the planet. It is clean, simple, easy to use and familiar to many millions of users worldwide.

Looking ahead, part of the Microsoft roadmap is the -Greenwich" IM system, which is part of the .NET Web services strategy. One of the features of Greenwich is its logging capability, which allows users to see instant messaging conversations they've had in the past. In fact, there are some industry segments in which that is a regulatory requirementââ,¬"financial services or medical services, for example, are required to keep records of all written correspondence.

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