Slashdot Mirror
Enterprise IM?
Jsf72672 asks: "With the recently-passed Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, and the looming HIPAA compliance requirements a constant thorn in the side of IT staff, Enterprise Instant Messaging seems to be overlooked. Most users are using AIM or MSN. Microsoft and Yahoo! both have products tailored to the Enterprise, but no one wants to rely their technology to keep them out of jail, or from paying huge fines. Jabber looks attractive but our already overtaxed IT staff does not have the time to compile, secure and test homegrown solutions. What are Slashdot-reading IT Managers doing? I found these guys and their InterIM line of products, and they look pretty good. Is anyone using them? Are there other low-cost solutions you have employed?"
I am getting ready to set up a print house up with 12 OSX workstations and they are very interested in using iChat not just communicate in their office, but since they will be using the Rendevous side of iChat also, they will be able to move large files around easily as well, without the files having to go through AOL's servers.
In addition, one of the main things they want is accountability, phone calls (unless you record and index them all) are really very temporary, while iChats can be saved and searched.
On a side note, I was thinking networking at least 5 of the comps that are in close proximity together using Firewire Over IP, but having done a short test between two comps using that setup, i got no better than a pitiful 60KB/ sec, what is up with that?
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Low cost it probably is not. And the client software sucks, be nice if they had at least 1/2 the functionality of Gaim.
The Deviant Tech., products looks interesting and is probably cheaper than Sametime. There is an interesting article here
If you already have existing contacts w/ IBM U might be able to leverage them to get a deal on Sametime, especially if you have Deviant Catalog sitting on your desk. ;) Deviant looks almost like an applicance type of idea and looks worth investigating.
For those who don't know, companies in the Financial Sector are now being required to same all e-mail, and IM communications for employees responsible for Financial decisions. In other words the Mutual Fund manager has all her communications recorded, but the lad cleaning the bog (loo/toilet/john ...) does not.
I believe that this data has to be saved for seven years (or five or something). From what I've heard it's a tremendous amount of data. Where I work there are thousands of employees whose e-mail & IM have to be saved. We talking many terabytes of data here and it's a real nightmare. Thankfully I'm not involved in that!
It will interesting to hear which solution you use, how easy it is to set up and run, and how the users like.
Afraid I have to post Anon, part of working for big Fin companies is not talking about what their infrastructure, or at least not telling which company's infrastructure one's referring to! Luck!
The guys you mentioned, Deviant, were at LinuxWorld in SF. They're running Jabber in a Shuttle case, with a bunch of extra logging and retention tricks. So you'd get the open standards and full support at the same time, for what I thought was a great price.
That said, it was too expensive for my client, who is now using a basic Jabber setup...
UserAdvocate: The voice of the user
I'm trying to figure this out myself.
The questioner doesn't have time to check out Jabber (a ``homegrown'' solution in his words) but seems to be willing to use a commercial product with presumably little or no testing.
WTF?
Perhaps I've been reading too many issues of Cryptogram, but it seems that its a crapshoot when a company advocates 'security'. For every product like PGP security, there seems to be a horde of products that are on par with ROT13 or XOR encryption.
Guess what - you need to test and analyze that commercial solution as well. What sort of encryption does it use? Where does it store logs? Are the logs encrypted? What happens if there is no global server? What happens when the network is faulty?
**Grumble** **Grumble**
Look at Jabber, its a good protocol. It does support SSL-connections. Some of the clients support encrypted logs. Its cross platform. Its extendable. It supports local servers. What more do you need?
If your company is going to be depending on an IM system, you better know how it works, how it scales, and what to do when it goes wrong.
ApplianSys in the UK do a Jabber server appliance - The IMbox200.
This kind of thing has to be a good option for people not confident at rolling their own, or for the enterprise that wants a solution that's easily supportable.
Just being able to plug a black-box into your network and have it authenticate with existing systems has got to be a bonus.
UBS Warburg span off their internal chat program into a company called Parlano. It's designed for the enterprise and so has logging etc built in. You may want to have a look.
Reuters Messaging. Specifically designed for the corporate user, with encryption, logging, resilience, etc etc.