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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Instant messaging for business: 3 packages tested February 10, 2003 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/productivity/soa/Instant-messaging-for-business-3-packages-tested/0,139023447,120271821,00.htm
 The ease and convenience of instant messaging has made it popular with users. But 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? 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 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: Putting IM to work
IM still begs the question, “What’s it good for in the workplace?” The capabilities of today’s IM applications go well beyond text-based chat and so do its potential uses. Let’s say your company has offices in other geographic locations, and you spend a respectable amount of your time on the phone with coworkers in those other offices. Long distance phone charges can mount in a hurry, particularly if any of those offices are located overseas. With the use of the “voice chat” features available in many of today’s IM suites, you can even have the equivalent of a speakerphone conversation using IM. This type of Voice over IP (VoIP) application is a good example of one of the many technologies that have become much more feasible and user-friendly with the proliferation of high speed Internet. With broadband, you can achieve excellent audio quality that rivals (or even surpasses) that offered by most of the world’s phone systems. You can even bring in multiple parties to a voice chat, and you can do all of this without paying for phone charges. Another benefit to using this feature is that you don’t tie up company phone lines, which is a potential boon for a small business that needs to make do with a limited number of lines. Many of today’s popular IM applications support videoconferencing—the benefits of videoconferencing really depend on your business and the value you attach to being able to see the other people in the conference. However, videoconferencing is still one area where there remains room for improvement in IM services. Even with a broadband connection, getting smooth video and reasonably fast frame rates is difficult, particularly if you throw in other collaboration features that can also soak up available bandwidth. Nevertheless, expect video quality on IM services to improve enough in the near future to rival dedicated videoconferencing systems. Today’s IM applications don’t stop at text chat and audio/video conferencing. File sharing is another handy IM feature. Let’s say that you need to quickly share a document with a coworker in another location. You could send the document by e-mail, but the message is subject to delivery lag time and workload of the e-mail servers involved. With IM, you can transfer the file right away and not worry about lag time. IM also offers application sharing, which can be a great feature for providing technical assistance. Application sharing can even go one step further and offer remote control features that allow you to access an application on a remote user’s desktop to share information, fine-tune a document or presentation, or help resolve a technical question. Although you can get remote control features with Windows XP’s Remote Assistance or third-party applications such as pcAnywhere or VNC, the IM solution is more attractive for most users because the applications are free and generally easier to set up and use. In addition, all your other collaboration features are built in and available in a single application. That means you can easily have a chat while you share an application or document. Even the text-only component of IM has uses in the business world. Let’s say you’re negotiating a big sale or a new contract on a conference phone call with both a coworker in another location and an important client. You and your coworker can exchange information and strategise in real time through IM while you carry on the phone conversation. Text chat also has important uses within the organisation when you need to communicate quickly with coworkers. For example, you can use IM without disrupting a meeting, something that probably wouldn’t be feasible with video or audio chat. -Jim Boyce IM still not secure
The safest way to exchange instant messages (IMs) is to stay within the enterprise, never exchanging unencrypted messages outside the firewall. But public IM programs are already being used to send plenty of business traffic beyond corporate walls. Most of that traffic is unfiltered, and almost never encrypted. Granted, there are programs that allow trading of encrypted messages among different corporate sites if you have a VPN (WiredRed Software’s e/pop and Jabber’s Messenger, for example). Your users can also chat securely with people at sites that use messaging products based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), such as IBM Lotus Sametime. But either way, you still haven’t made it safe for users to exchange instant messages with AOL, MSN, or Yahoo, which do not use encryption at their end. No matter how secure your internal IM, letting users talk to the unencrypted public networks means messages are being sent over the Internet and can be intercepted, read, and exploited. Most end users are unaware that seemingly benign business information can put their companies at risk, whether the information is as “innocent” as the name of the janitor or the type of mail server running, both of which can lead to attack by social engineering. Yet instant messages between your employees and outsiders may contain material with much more obvious liabilities—especially when employees believe their communications are secure. If you want to know how many of your employees are already using unencrypted IM networks, download Akonix Rogue Aware, and see for yourself. The free monitoring tool exposes hidden IM traffic and shows usage statistics, but to enforce your policy, your IT department will need IM-Policy Manager, which can restrict employees from using public messengers. If you choose to keep all your IMs within the corporate firewall, you need to decide whether to encrypt at the desktop or at the server, or both. The argument stems from whether it’s more dangerous to send clear text to the server, or to have employees playing with encryption schemes in the client. Companies in regulated industries have to decrypt their messages at some point in order to keep records of them in plain text. As such, encryption may be necessary before and after the recording step. Cloudswell SCIM Enterprise Server
SCIM stands for Secure Cryptographic Instant Messenger, and one can hardly disagree with the name—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 requirement—financial services or medical services, for example, are required to keep records of all written correspondence.
Comparison
How we tested
We looked at how easily the server and client software could be installed and configured, and how well it integrated with and imported user names from an existing directory server. Interoperability: We looked at the ability to work with industry standards, especially SIP/SIMPLE, and also the variety of operating systems and devices (including handheld devices and mobile phones) that the client software could run on. Futureproofing: Here we considered how the IM server would work with a business’ existing directory systems such as Active Directory and LDAP. ROI: We looked at overall price and considered existing infrastructures. Service: This was calculated on the support cost per year per user. What to look for in an instant messaging package
Sample Scenario Company: Mondego Consulting Scenario: This company’s staff is currently using a non-secure consumer instant messaging service, and the company wants to provide a secure alternative it can manage internally. Approximate budget: Open. Requires: An instant messaging server platform. Concerns: Staffers use IM to keep in touch with branch offices, so security is a big concern. Management hassles and time are also a worry, so the system must be able to integrate easily with the company’s directory server. Best Solution: Mondego’s best solution would depend heavily on their needs and current infrastructure. If you need a relatively simple but secure system with a variety of client OSes, SCIM works quite effectively, but if you are already an Exchange or Notes, user, there is little point in setting up new infrastructure to handle instant messaging. All systems were quite complicated enterprise-level applications, and not designed to be installed by the faint of heart, but in terms of user friendliness, all the clients were quite good (though the increased functionality of MSN messenger meant there are many options available that may confuse). Subscribe now to Australian Technology & Business magazine.
About RMIT Test Labs
RMIT IT Test Labs is an independent testing institution based in Melbourne, Victoria, performing IT product testing for clients such as IBM, Coles-Myer, and a wide variety of government bodies. In the Labs’ testing for Technology & Business, they are in direct contact with the clients supplying products. Their findings are their own—only the specifications of the products to be tested are provided by the magazine. For more information on RMIT, please contact the Lab Manager, Steven Turvey.
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