The leader in the enterprise instant messaging (EIM) arena isn't resting on its laurels.
In enhancing its Lotus software portfolio, IBM Corp. announced new features and enhancements for its Sametime collaboration product. Probably the biggest addition to Sametime 3 is support of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) gateway, which will help allow users to communicate across supported IM communities.
The new features are undoubtedly important to Sametime's already-established customer base, which is huge in the EIM space. A newly released study from Osterman Research found that while Sametime saw its presence increase a bit in all organizations, it actually dropped among all companies that have adopted a corporate standard -- to 61% from 64% in March. Among those organizations with more than 1,000 e-mail users, 73% have adopted Lotus Sametime, down from 82% in March.
Through its support of SIP and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), IBM says it is the first major software vendor to provide a standards-based approach to interoperability via the Sametime 3 Instant Messaging Gateway. This feature lets companies connect corporate instant messaging systems with one another, while enabling security features across the connection.
SIP is part of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards process and is modeled upon other Internet protocols such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). SIP is used to establish, change, and end sessions between one or more users in an IP-based network.
IBM has been attracted to SIP for Sametime for interoperability among EIM systems, as well as for connections to the public IM networks. Earlier this year, Jeremy Dies, offerings manager for the Advanced Collaboration Group at Lotus Software, said that his group was evaluating SIP and SIMPLE for inclusion in Sametime. But the new release would "actually have some controls over who you can and cannot add to your buddy list."
"We believe that in order for enterprises to do interoperability smartly, they can't just have a switch you flip that opens your community to everyone on the Internet," he also said. "It needs to have some administration controls, so that customers can pick and choose, based on business need, who can and can't have access to the instant-messaging environment."
Now, that functionality is here. And in an interview today, Dies said the "really cool" aspect of Sametime's interoperability is that it uses the only standard defined by the IETF. For now, though, Lotus is using the "gateway" approach in exchanging information among EIM systems. "Eventually, we foresee full SIP/SIMPLE support (in the industry). And once the protocol emerges and becomes more robust, we'll be able to deliver on that. But for right now, the gateway approach is the best option available."
IBM Lotus also tested server-to-server interoperability via SIP/SIMPLE with America Online and its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) service. But AOL has recently said it is abandoning that kind of interoperability in favor of striking deals with companies to let them directly access AIM users and their presence information.
All of the SIP/SIMPLE talk touches on an ongoing battle within the IM community as a whole, in terms of standards. As Dies points out, SIP/SIMPLE is not only the one approved SIP/SIMPLE standard, it is being used as the basis for products from two of the biggest software firms in the world -- IBM and Microsoft. With all of that, "you can have a lot of faith that that standard will in fact be the standard," he said. "Because the standard is only as good as the people behind it."
Another proposed standard that's making its way through the IETF is XMPP (extensible messaging and presence protocol) from Jabber. Officials at the company have said they're expecting the consortium to name a working group to examine making XMPP a standard.
Also improved in the new Sametime is presence -- a technology and concept that IBM believes is the Internet's next "killer app," Dies said. Now that the market is starting to "get" what presence is and what it does, he said, Lotus decided to filter presence through applications. A toolkit available with Sametime, for example, lets administrators put HTML tags around names in a Web application so that name "lights up" as being contactable via the Sametime client.
"We want to be the presence engine in the enterprise...presence awareness is a network-level technology now, not just a buddy-list application," he said.
Manageability of Sametime messaging is also improved, Dies said. So Lotus has done a lot of work through feedback with its customers -- including people who use Sametime within IBM itself -- to implement new features and products to help with the thousands of users and messages that can use the software at any one time. The Enterprise Meeting Server, for example, performs load balancing and clustering specifically for IM services. New administration tools, meantime, enable IT departments to slice and dice usage in ways that are more efficient, Dies said.
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