All talk and no Microsoft
By Davey Winder in Editorial
IBM has announced the creation of what it calls the world’s largest business Instant Messaging community, courtesy of new support for industry standards between business and consumer IM services. It is great news for anyone using IBM Lotus Sametime, AIM and Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger users will be able to join in the conversation in the coming weeks as well.
Not so great if you happen to be a user of MSN Messenger or Live Communication Server though, as IBM has not included Microsoft in its chat strategy.
From what I understand of the technical background this has not been done because of any technological stumbling block as integrated access between the clients is possible through the use of both industry standards for instant messaging - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) standard and the Session Initiated Protocol (SIP/SIMPLE) standard. And there is certainly no reason to think that back office politics have come into play either as Microsoft and IBM would appear to be on good terms at the moment. Which leaves me wondering just what was the reasoning behind the odd omission. It has been suggested that it was a pure business decision, driven by the not needing the additional Microsoft support in order to reach critical mass when it comes to business IM users. Connecting the instant messaging communities this way brings IBM Lotus Sametime users into the radar of some 157 million instant messaging users worldwide after all. That is, as a matter of elimination, the most likely scenario but it remains a puzzling decision and one that leaves too many questions unanswered for my liking.
The ugly truth is, without those answers coming thick and fast, the decision will simply be seen as a snub and nothing else.
Which will be a shame, because despite my well publicized dislike from a security perspective of IM in the workplace, an IBM CEO study recently concluded that executives worldwide believe that in order to achieve effective growth they must communicate beyond corporate walls, and IM is seen as an increasingly effective way to do this. The announcement by IBM means that it becomes, as far as I am aware, the first major enterprise vendor to use standards to connect more than 70% of the worldwide IM user base through the Lotus Sametime Gateway which acts as an intermediary between Lotus Sametime and each public IM community. It does this by receiving instant messages, translating them into the proper protocol, and delivering them to recipients regardless of platform. Of course, IT administrators can take advantage of the policy management feature of the Lotus Sametime Gateway to provide customized access based on a user’s business need, and taking into account security issues. Something I approve of immensely…
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