‘The world of Instant Messaging (IM) was once the preserve of teenagers who wanted to chat with friends. However, you could only chat with friends using the same IM service provider. But in 2004, Microsoft announced that its enterprise IM platform, Live Communication Server, would link to public services such as America Online (AOL) and Yahoo. Now at Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, Florida, (22-26 January), IBM announced that Sametime (IBM’s real time collaboration platform) has agreements with AOL and Yahoo, which will mean that Sametime 7.5 users can chat with users of these popular IM service providers. IBM also announced that it is in discussions to extend this interoperability to Google Talk and Apple Computer’s ichat, but strangely no mention of Microsoft’s MSN or Live Communication Server.

However, before making the leap to IM using a mixture of public services and enterprise IM platforms, IT departments should be aware of the following issues with public IM services.’

Read more at Is Instant Messaging becoming mainstream for business users?

‘The world of Instant Messaging (IM) was once the preserve of teenagers who wanted to chat with friends. However, you could only chat with friends using the same IM service provider. But in 2004, Microsoft announced that its enterprise IM platform, Live Communication Server, would link to public services such as America Online (AOL) and Yahoo. Now at Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, Florida, (22-26 January), IBM announced that Sametime (IBM’s real time collaboration platform) has agreements with AOL and Yahoo, which will mean that Sametime 7.5 users can chat with users of these popular IM service providers. IBM also announced that it is in discussions to extend this interoperability to Google Talk and Apple Computer’s ichat, but strangely no mention of Microsoft’s MSN or Live Communication Server.

However, before making the leap to IM using a mixture of public services and enterprise IM platforms, IT departments should be aware of the following issues with public IM services.’

Read more at Is Instant Messaging becoming mainstream for business users?