Just days after Yahoo canned the enterprise version of its free instant-messaging client, AOL announces that it is halting sales of its own enterprise IM offering. This pretty much leaves Microsoft and Sonork playing ball alone in the Enterprise IM’ing market. Skype is an interesting VoIP alternative to Enterprise IM’ing (no ads/spyware according to them) and it now has a version for Linux (Qt-based).
The State of Enterprise IM and VoIP
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Here a screenshot: http://img1.photobucket.com/albums/0903/RedPinguim/aplicativos/skyp…
What about IBMs Lotus Workplace Messaging (was Lotus Sametime). with the new emphasis on the eclipse based workplace client, which will be supported for linux (!!!) there is a great “alternative” in enterprise class messaging systems:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/lotusworkplacemessag…
http://www.jabber.com/
http://www.tipic.com/
http://www.antepo.com/
Since it is QT-Based, it blends wonderfully with the rest of my KDE desktop. Can’t wait to properly test this thing (I’m at work now, sadly ;-)). Of course, I’ll get rid of it as soon as possible if the ad-ware and/or spyware and other crapware also comes bundled as a “feature”.
DeadFish Man
I’ve got it running and it works quite well. I was happy to see it drop right into my toolbar in KDE.. good integration going for them.
As for IM.. I agree with other comments. Jabber-based systems seem to have pretty good traction..
I’ve got over 700 users on 2 jabber internal servers, over 40K IMs every day going through those 2 servers.
Lotus (arguably the gold standard in corporate communication) has who knows how many corportate seats with IM and it’s not mentioned either…
It boggles the mind how people write these statements without doing a second’s worth of research…
At this point Skype for Linux is being offered without the SkypeOut service that allows calls to go to any telephone, not just other Skype users.
in what ways does the enterprise use IM, other than chatting? am i missing something.. i must be .. big telecoms have invested money and development time doing this…
A lot of people use IM at my company for more than chatting. It’s an easier way to communicate for those things that require more interactivity than email and more details than can be easily explained over a phone.
For example, I work in IT but my job requires me to interact with people from almost every department, in particular HR and marketing. For the people in those two departments that I talk with the most, we use IM for a lot of conversations that are just quickly asking questions. It’s an unspoken rule that if someone doesn’t answer right away that we send it in an email. Even if we’re talking on the phone it’s easier to cut and paste a URL into an IM window than have to email it.
I also deal with two outside developers that are working on a project for us. We IM all the time about various issues such as deliverables and bug status. It’s kind of like talking on the phone but it’s great when things don’t have to move at the real-time pace of a phone call.
I should clarify that my experience is based upon my office at my company (~375 people). I can’t say how widely used it is inside the whole company (~60,000 people) but we do have dedicated servers for MSN messaging inside the company. A lot of people at my office use Yahoo.
For the record, I don’t like Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft. I have been developing my own IM client and server (Based on existing open source jabber clients/servers that does not break compatability)
Jabber is the way to go.
I worked at IBM once and they use IM to work. They don’t chat with it. Say there is a developers in the US and he want’s to know how numbers are represented in Ireland, I can send an IM to all IBMers in .ie, or to the rest of the world. Those who know will answer.
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http://ubix.org
So what’s with OSnews and Qt? I assume that if Skype had been a Gtk/Java app it wouldn’t even have been mentioned what toolkit the app uses, now it’s made to look like “yeah, it’s free but it uses Qt, and that’s bad”… Sigh.
It’s pretty cool and looks nice. Still has a couple of bugs though.
It only supports OSS, which is fine, but it is hardcoded to use /dev/dsp for both sound input and output. So with my seperate usb microphone I’m out of luck. Hopefully they fix that soon.
if somebody wants to test the IBM Community Tools – a tool suite for collaboration based on instant messaging – you can download it for free from http://community.ngi.ibm.com/ !!!
there is a linux version available.
http://www.amsoftwaredesign.com
It’s IM server runs on Windows or linux and has most if not all of the features of Sametime or the others and is much cheaper. The system is 3 tier with a pure TCP/IP application server that runs as a service on windows and a daemon on Linux. The database backend is provided by Firebird SQL 1.5 and in our environment we are processing close to 100,000 messages a week with about 300 concurrent users.
There are other solutions out there, you just have to look.
Many of the above posts are annoyed missives pointing out that there are other Instant Messaging platforms that the article fails to mention. But, all of these IM systems cannot be compared to the commercial IM systems.
The fact is that while the open source community has produced a vast array of instant messaging servers and clients, they are all basic text based chat systems. Nothing more. Meanwhile the commercial offerings such as Yahoo, AIM, MSN have advanced their feature set significantly. They have gone beyond basic text chatting and added features like whiteboarding, VoIP voice chat and even video conferencing.
As great as Jabber is, you can’t do voice or video with it so, when compared to the commercial offerings, it doesn’t hold a candle to them. What’s even more sad is that it doesn’t look like anyone is putting any effort into implementing these features. Jabber development is almost completely stagnant. The 2.0 Jabber referrence server is a year or more old and it still doesn’t support half of the features that the previous 1.x server did, much less new features like voice and video.
groupwise im
http://www.novell.com/collateral/4613331/4613331.html