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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.

12 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. irc? by terminal96 · · Score: 4, Informative

    we have a company irc server where i work. works well enough.

  2. Re:What's Wrong with Jabber? by the+uNF+cola · · Score: 5, Informative
    Jabber doesn't integrate with sun's other enterprise utility servers.


    The platform, which consists of several separate server packages -- Sun ONE Messaging Server, Sun ONE Instant Messaging, Sun ONE Portal, Sun ONE Calendar Server, and Sun ONE Identity Server -- is available now and takes aim at rivals Microsoft and IBM/Lotus in the lucrative collaboration arena, said David Ferris, analyst with Ferris Research.


    It's like wanting jabber to integrate with yahoo mail and yahoo calendar, along with the privacy.

    Not to slam jabber at all, just the right tool for the right job, eh? Just one that requirs sun software :)
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  3. Re:What's Wrong with Jabber? by redcliffe · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you've got your own Jabber server, then it's your fault if it goes down. That's the whole point, the server is freely available to download, I could run one on my LAN if I wanted to.

  4. Real insightful, CowboyNeal by p3d0 · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.
    Yeah, it was the next logical step several years ago. IBM has been using the Sametime IM internally for as long as I have worked there.
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  5. This should be alright...as long.. by Quass · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Also Messaging for Customers, Partners and Remote by foniksonik · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

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  7. Re:Cost and offering by Henry+Stern · · Score: 3, Informative

    $3000 for 100 users is not only on par with the competition, but is small potatoes. A few years ago, I helped with a Domino/Notes/Sametime rollout where the server software before the CALs was well over five figures.

    Jabber is only an IM service. Sun ONE is a whole enterprise collaboration environment. Comparing the two is like comparing KWord and Microsoft Office.

  8. Re:Sun and version by Surak · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, SunOS 4.x is the older, more BSD flavoured, version of their operating system. SunOS 5.x is the version of their operating system that we normally associate with the Solaris environment. So, Solaris 2.4 would be running SunOS 5.4, not SunOS 4. Solaris 2.5.1 ran SunOS 5.5.1, etc. Note that Sun did eventually rename the older SunOS 4.x operating environment Solaris 1.x just to confuse people even more. :-)

    Thanks for clearing that up. :) You can clearly see why even I, who had more of a clue than the parent poster, was still confused. :)

  9. Re:What's Wrong with Jabber? by rgraham · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you go to Jabber.org you'll see there has been a lot of large investments/installations of the Jabber protocol (usually from Jabber Inc.) recently, from companies like Intel, France Telecom, EarthLink, etc. So I think headway is being made, but there aren't large annoucements being made that Joe AOL user would notice. And maybe that is where the problem is. When a city government I was contracting for was looking for an instant messenger solution I instantly suggested Jabber, since I had worked with both the open-source Jabberd and Jabber Inc servers. Fortunately, with Jabber Inc being a local company (I live in Denver) getting them to come out and show-off their wares wasn't a difficult thing to do. But, I'm sure that outside of my boss at the time, very few, if any, of the city's IT people were aware of Jabber and were all probably thinking AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, whenever the topic of IM came up.

  10. Re:What's Wrong with Jabber? by demaria · · Score: 2, Informative

    Jabber (from the commercial Jabber company, not the generic protocol) has a server user interface that makes sendmail configs look fun, no polls, no surveys, no screensharing, no whiteboard and no moderated chat rooms. Sun has all of those, and some are very useful.

  11. Wrong by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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  12. Re:Sun and version by christophersaul · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's not version 1.0. There was a previous version which was around under the iPlanet and then Sun ONE brand and is used by various customers. It was version 3 then, to fit in with the fact it was an add-on to Portal Server 3.0. We're now at Portal Server 6.0, hence the numbering match.

    http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/portal_icp /h ome_portal_icp.html