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Sun Launches Instant Messaging Server
theIG writes "According to this article at geek.com, and another one at InternetWeek, Sun has shipped the first part of its new enterprise collaboration platform to compete with Exchange and Domino. Dubbed 'Sun ONE Instant Messaging 6.0,' this server will work with other products to be released in May, to allow a single login for all of its services that allow connections from outside a corporate firewall." Instant messaging is becoming increasingly popular in the workplace. Local messaging servers like this were only the next logical step for businesses which don't wish to rely on an outside network for their messaging.
You can run your own Jabber server, and it can also message other Jabber users. Some of the clients support encryption too.
*installs linux on AMD chip
*installs Jabber
*saves 10k
*buys sweet rig and waits to host doom3
we have a company irc server where i work. works well enough.
It doesn't matter how great the software is... frankly it's too late for a new entry. Because of network effects, messaging software is only as good as the number of people who already use it.
Integrate with sun's other services, which will compete with MS and Lotus collaboration suites? Jabber only does IM, which is great and all, but doens't integrate on those levels.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
This is a server that you run in an office, not a competitor to ICQ and Yahoo.
The data never leaves your private network, unlike Messenger, which routes everything through Redmond or wherever.
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
The last version of Jabber I downloaded had an absolutely awful interface. It was usuable, although I think that for Joe Sixpack, it wouldn't be a serious option. I am quite computer savvy, (Java, PHP, Python, Perl, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows 2000) but I couldn't get to grips with it. The most popular system in South Africa seems to be MSN Messenger, followed by Yahoo Instant Messenger and ICQ's Messaging System.
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
This way they'll never get JoeSixpack to buy a single server!.. Come on!..
So this costs $30 per user and no mention of the client software requirements. Will they just be Solaris or Linux/Windows/Solaris? As other people have said why not just role out jabber?
With Sun: For a 100 person organsiation cost = $3000 + implementation time
With Jabber: implementation time
BIt of a no brainer?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The appeal to me is that Jabber is an open standard with well thought out open protocols. Anyone can write their own Jabber client in any language. Same for interfaces.
There are libraries that let you write integration code for any program you have. Search CPAN for Jabber and you'll see what I mean.
Can I interface Sun's product with my company's homebrew scheduling system and the online shop I wrote? I know that I can with Jabber.
Jim
-- My Weblog.
"for businesses which don't wish to rely on an outside network for their messaging"
They may not wish to rely on outside systems for internal communication but connections to outside IM systems may be essential. I won't lie I've not read the link yet. But my first though is how it would interact with other messaging systems.
The current biggies AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo are no good as fragmented seperates - think back to BBS systems. Until they all sit down and decide to play together and use an Open standard it's not going to be as usefull as it could be. Untill then people will use what ever "frigs" they can to get them to interoperate such as Trillian (recommned the pro version by the way) or Jabbers connections.
Of course being HW focused if Sun push for an Open messaging standard touting their HW to power it all we could see some action but unfortunately they are a bit late in the game to weild that sort of power.
IM should interoperate and be as widespread as e-mail but it won't while everyone diggs in and backs their own standard.
.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
The problem with having multiple clients is that although they may all start off using the standard Jabber protocol, if you want to call it that, they will eventually grow apart and some will have features that are exclusive to that particular client, and cause problems for people running other clients. This is why I would prefer a standard client distribution like MSN/ICQ/Yahoo have. (Although Jabber's more open nature, as well as it's ability to do inter-protocol messaging and integration, is a big bonus). Perhaps if they created a standard client distribution, and created a superior interface for it, Jabber would take off amoung the masses. Until then, it looks doubtful that it will enjoy success that MSN, ICQ and Yahoo have.
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
Hey, I thought it's not allowed to chat while you're working.
But I'm wondering who will need it. I mean, here where I work we just call each other if we want to talk or have questions. Its faster, you can type or do whatever while you're talking to someone.
And if you really need an IM-System, then why not use Jabber? It's free, and there are a lot of clients for different platforms and needs.
craesh
the first part of its new enterprise collaboration platform to compete with Exchange and Domino. Dubbed 'Sun ONE InstantMessaging 6.0
First the abrupt jump from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 8, and now the first version of a new product is dubbed 6.0! Someone needs to smack the marketroids at Sun upside the head with the news that version numbers aren't just there because they make a pretty sound when you say them, they're meant to convey information to the customer. Sun's engineers seem immune to this, Solaris 8 still reports itself internally as SunOS 5.8, which kinda makes sense. Microsoft are Sybase are also guilty of doing it.
I can imagine the meeting now:
Marketer: Version 2 is better than 1 right?
Engineer: Sure
Marketer: And version 3 is better than 2?
Engineer: Umm, usually.
Marketer: Great! So the higher the number, the better the product!
Ah, I remember the good old days when Sun competed on technology, not hype. Most people I know are still running 2.6 in production, there's simply not enough new stuff in 8 to justify anything more than calling it 2.8, but while it's easy to get sign-off on a minor version patch, major versions need a lot more regression (on paper at least) and who's got the time for that?
I don't see why they couldn't do it, though. Wasn't there some link between Netscape, AOL and Sun? Should still be as far as I know.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
> ... frankly it's too late for a new entry.
I read many comments like yours on Slashdot, and I can understand why you say that. For typical slashdotters, yes, Sun's announcement feels like too late. If you live in a major city in US or its metropolitan area, perhaps that's how you feel. If you work in the IT industry, more so. But the reality is that we are still at the beginning of the information age. I truly feel that the market is wide open.
If you look beyond US metropolitan area (and other, what they call, developed countries), there is a huge opportunity. There does not seem to be a wide margin in the IT industry in US, but there is China. There's large part of EU. Potentially, Middle East, now that Iraq war is pretty much over. Just that... it's over 5 times bigger that the whole US. Market is wide open.
In addition, Sun does have competitive edge over Exchange and Domino. The fact is that MS is stuck in the world of 32 bit. They say IA-64 is coming, but even if it arrives tomorrow, how long do they take to make it really functional AND get support from other ISVs? Domino is a competitive product, but Sun is really kicking IBM's ass in high end because of its quality, openness, and price.
I am not a marketing analyst and I cannot or dear not predict the future, BUT I do say that "... it's too late" sounds a little premature.
Would you mind checking the times on posts before marking them redundant?
A lot of pals I yap with ARE from the office. And what's preventing the "all day yap" is because hanging out at eachothers cubes would attract volumous attention.
I cannot imagine this increasing productivity. really cannot. People will be able to interrupt your legitimate work from the convenience of their own cube! and I doubt you can hide yourself (invisible) because that would totally be against the whole point of INSTANT messenging.
And before people goes about and talk about monitoring your IM logs -
1) you can speak in coded words. "new product announcement at the convention" = "movie that just got released" or something
2) IT depts are stressed as they are - and they won't have that kind of time
3) as for your boss, I am sure number 1 would work quite effectively - because if you work under a intelligent and capable boss, he would be smart enough to not have this whole nonsense in your dept anyhow.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
But can you interface with their (sun) products, which you want?
Jabber just wont fit.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
One reason for Redhat going from 8 -> 9. Purely marketing. Normally people expect high numbers are better however it always become when someone releases version 11 of something. Is that v1.1 or v12? Lots of fun :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I work at a major corporation, and we use "Lotus Sametime" as our messenging client. At first I was put off by the lack of features (ie. timestamping, etc..) but it has interoperability with AIM, so I find it quite nice to use.
As long as Sun goes with something like AOL compatibility for outside-the-intranet communication, they should be sitting pretty. Why would this even be necessary? Well the obvious is chatting with friends/family - without having to install a secondary client - but, also I know in my company we deal with outside agencies and businesses, and its much easier being able to IM them, than to send emails, or phone.
This isn't just for internal use... it works specifically with your firewall to provide secure authentication for Customers, Partners and Remote Employees around the world so you have a single sign on Messaging system for EVERYONE in your business.
My company could use this.
Of course to really see all the benefits you will want to use the other components as well which all use Liberty spec and SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) for completely single sign on to messaging (e-mail), calendaring, instant messaging and web portal / content management.
Remember that this is just the latest incarnation of iPlanet.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
too little, too late .. and for this platform,
useless at any rate. what outfit that you know
of (that isn't stuck in the stone age) uses sun
as a primary desktop platform? .. few to none.
sun should just sell their assets off and run
today while the running is better than tomorrow.
hell, we're even switching to linux for everything,
and we're definitely not a small shop. not that
this necessarily precludes sun, but why couple
free OS with pricey hardware that is no more
stable than the cheaper stuff? .. expensive
support, little if any third party products or
competition - bleh. i loved sun back in the day,
but a new day came, and we're with it.
Picture an employee at his desk. His AIM pop's up:
TheBoss: How did our trade secrets get out? I'm calling for a full investigation!
Employee: Maybe it's because we use AOL for our chat and they receive everything we send!
TheBoss: What? Quick! Get a Sun ONE Server!
we didn't need any fancy messaging clients:
$ mesg y ; man write
$ man talk
kplzthxgoal.
with the logging option in /etc/vfstab.
-jpeg
We were really lacking in the instant messaging server department. No if they would only come out with an MP3 player, they'd take over the world.
The website does not exist. It has been destroyed by the grace of Allah and the infidels who created it were chased away to their deaths by the mighty Iraqi Army.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
I've been using IM on a sun network for years.
Why a server in the first place? This is an ideal situation for ZeroConf. It will automically constrain to the corporate LAN or workgroup (depending on how IT constrains the network). And no server is required at all. Try iChat for an example of how this works. You just launch the messaging app and everyone is automatically detected.
i get to bling use an instant bling messenger at bling work.
Honestly, I think email is enough of a distraction at work. I can't count the number of times that i've been coding away.. and an email pops up... which gets me out of the groove.
Did you people bother read the article? Jabber doesn't integrate with sun's suite. If they foudn the technology usable, the may have used it.
It's not about SUN making IM softare. It's about their IM/Collaboration/Calendar/Email suite. It's about them releasing software, that integrates well with their software. Being redundant there. It's about cool little popups from their IM program telling you about a meeting or about email, muchlike yahoo client does
If you wanna keep talking about Jabber Protocol, why not SOAP, or XML-RPC? Cripes... As if that's what the article really is about.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The commercial jabber client at jabber.com?
I will say this though--
The documentation for jabberd 1.4.x could use some work. The first time I tried it, I could not get it to work, and only recently have I got things to work. I am hoping that this will improve with 2.0.x where all the work seems to be at the moment.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
As far as RH going straight from 8->9
If you were at all familiar with RedHat versioning, you'd know that all revisions within a major version are binary compatible with each other, and major versions are not guaranteed to be binary compatible with each other. (Some may work fine, other binaries won't. Mostly this pertains to C++ apps, but in RH9, this pertained to anything that used threading.) RedHat decided that it was best for the distribution to move to a new threading architecture. It happened that this new threading system broke binary compatibility with RedHat 8.
As a result, consistent with RedHat's versioning policies, it was called RedHat 9.
I will admit that it does have a fringe marketing benefit, but the main reason for 9 was that it broke binary compatibility with RH8.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Anyone who has ever used Domino's document management tools or developed an application for Notes knows exactly what I mean. You have the ability to develop highly advanced applications, not just folders full of sticky notes (e.g. Exchange). You don't have filing cabinets full of sticky notes, do you? Why should your database?
The biggest disadvantage of Domino is the fact that developing for it is kind of its own little world. I'm looking forward to Domino R7's integration with WebSphere. But even until then, Domino gives you a document management development environment second to none.
The weird thing is that the feature that everyone looks at Domino most closely for, e-mail, is its weakest point. That's what comes from building e-mail around a document-mangement platform, instead of building document management around an e-mail platform.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
If people remember, chillisoft made it possible to do asp on *unix based systems. It was recently takes into Sun as Sun One.
If anyone's played with Sun before, this will most likely end up in another propietary mess. You have to buy a sun machine, instead of using your own servers, get their licenses for the OS, software, and seats and other crap if you want it to tie in with the rest of their Sun suite.
Plus, you can't put it in yourself, so you have to pay for their consulting fees. To which, the consultants from Sun know enough to start the engine and the basic setup.
And at the end of Sun's quarter, you'll get phone calls and emails if you're happy with the services and be asked if you want to upgrade. It's a never ending cycle, how do I know? I just freaking know...
If Sun is using closed protocols that can only interface with other Sun programs, what the hell good are they? The Open Source Community might just adopt their functionality and leave them in the cold. Again.
I would choose an option that offered fewer initial features, but completely open standards. At least then, I'm not relying upon the vendor for functionality.
-- My Weblog.
its called WALL!!??
Instant Messaging Planet (http://www.instantmessagingplanet) covered this months ago when the Sun product manager unveiled the product and spoke about it at the Enterprise IM conference in Boston.
Another IM service is just what I've been missing!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
why can't some IRC developers come up with an addon that would allow for voice chat as well as viewing of webcams? Then if a company like trillian or whoever would write an IM client that uses those features of the IRC server.. it would seriously kick ass.. but to regular IRC users.. it would look just like normal IRC.. ya get me?
http://www.awwsheezy.com
A few shameless plugs, yes, but the facts remain. Gaim is available for a plethora of platforms. Of those platforms, the Gaim-Encryption plugin works on 4 of them: Solaris (Sparc), Linux (x86), Win32, and Familiar Linux on the iPAQ (arm).
The Gaim-Encryption plugin uses OpenSSL with RSA keys, auto key exchange, etc. Really really good stuff. And best I can tell, gaim is now the ONLY IM client with cross-platform encryption. The encrypt plugin lets you talk crypto across ANY of the IM platforms gaim supports, which is not a short list: AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Yahoo!, ICQ, Napster(?), Zephyr, and Gadu-Gadu.
The Gaim-Encryption maintainer provides pre-built packages and installers for several distros and Win32. So you can get it all in one spot.
Seriously, "It Works. Well(tm)".
Jabber is a generic distributed message-passing system. Just because there is an IM system built on top of it, people think that that is all that it can do. Do some research! Learn about something before you demean it!
Open standards aren't a panacea. I love saying "isn't a panacea".
Opensource is good and all. Open standards are great and all as well. But you can't judge a product on its openness. After all, is the sorenson codec or OS X (both apple) bad? How about trillian? Great piece of software... and it's closed.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
"Jabber is *not* an instant messaging protocol. It just happens to be useful for instant messaging ;-)
Jabber is a protocol for streaming XML."
Novell has also recently come out with an enterprise secure IM product, it integrates into edir directly. Free for groupwise 6.5 owners. More information can be found here -e n_web/readmeen_web.html_ 1555761_2a rticle.php/15481516
http://www.novell.com/documentation/lg/nm1/readme
http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/10824
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=8
...And it will be called YAPPOSIMS
or Yet Another Proprietary Piece of Sh*t Instant Messaging Standard
I note that someone has addressed the 6.0 issue with the IM. I can do a little with regard to the clarification of 5.8/8 etc.
.... you get the picture.
First off, Solaris went from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7. Note that this number is a representation of the Operating Environment.
Now, when you start talking about 5.8, you are talking about the kernel.
5.7 is the kernel that goes with the Solaris 7 OE
5.8 is the kernel that goes with the Solaris 8 OE
5.9 is the
So it's not a case of Solaris 8 reporting itself internally as 5.8. The uname -a output is giving you the kernel version.
It's no different from RedHat X using Linux version Y.
Does this require me to run my own Jabber server?
Does this require me to code my own Jabber server?
.net suffix is dead ... so, they should call it 2003 instead :o)