Where Microsoft's competitive instincts might sometimes seem to close doors, they also occasionally leave a door open, as WebMessenger demonstrated today with the announcement of WebMessenger Mobile for Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). The product will allow BlackBerry users to take advantage of presence and IM capabilities offered by Microsoft's unified communications platform.

In an interview with Instant Messaging Planet, WebMessenger president Joe Naylor said a combination of ties to Microsoft as a Partner and Microsoft's need to compete with RIM's BlackBerry with its own Windows Mobile platform helped his company discern an opportunity.

"They [Microsoft] want to take RIM's share of the market with their Windows Mobile Devices," said Naylor, but because BlackBerry is heavily entrenched in a number of enterprises, he said the company faces a "long slog."

In the mean time, said Naylor, Microsoft's lack of support for BlackBerry devices was causing discontent in enterprises considering deployments of Microsoft OCS, especially in the financial industry. Its October, 2007 acquisition of Parlano in October, for instance, brought in a number of large financial sector accounts looking for support for their existing BlackBerry users.

Thanks to its status as a Microsoft Partner, Naylor said, the company could take advantage of unpublished APIs and communications with both Microsoft and its other partners to discern a market for its own product.

Naylor says WebMessenger got its start in 2002 as a sort of "Trillian for your mobile" and moved quickly into enterprise markets when it established a global site license with IBM in support of the company's Lotus SameTime platform.

According to Naylor, WebMessenger uses vendor-provided SDKs on the server side and a proprietary communications protocol providing strong encryption on the client side to interoperate with a number of enterprise communications servers, including OCS, SameTime and Jabber XCP.

In addition to offering better performance through device-specific software, Naylor said WebMessenger also optimizes client network performance, providing tweaks for specific mobile carriers and optimizing data queuing as users move in and out of data coverage.

WebMessenger's BlackBerry client will connect with its server component (which runs on Linux or Windows Server 2003, though Naylor says most deployments are on the latter) via an organization's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

The WebMessenger server supports Active Directory and LDAP synchronization, allowing administrators to identify which users in an organization will require support. Once those users are identified, he said, the WebMessenger client is pushed to their devices via the organization's BES. Since the WebMessenger server integrates with OCS, Naylor said users won't have to reenter contact lists once they've downloaded the client.

Once connected to the organization's OCS deployment, clients will be able to participate in a number of the server's features, including presence notification, federation with other IM networks, connection with enterprise voice IP PBX platforms, participation in persistent group chat, and monitoring by the organization's auditing and compliance tracking tools.

The product is available starting today at a cost of $72 per device, with no cost for the server. The software license is perpetual, with ongoing costs taking the form of a 20 percent maintenance fee.

Poised for a Bite of the Enterprise Apple

Another mobile player has emerged in the last year with the launch of the Apple iPhone, and it, too, has attracted WebMessenger's attention, though Apple own practices don't make the popular device the easiest target for a company whose partnerships have been cultivated in the Windows space.

"We're anxiously awaiting the SDK," said Naylor, who said both he and WebMessenger's CTO bought iPhones within days of the product launch.

Regardless of how eager WebMessenger is to get to work on an iPhone client, Apple's own legendary silence about its plans, along with at least one technical issue, have dampened the company's enthusiasm. The device will not allow more than one application to run at a time, making the iPhone a poor platform for enterprise IM, which is expected to continuously provide presence information.