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AOL-Yahoo-MSN Messaging Unified... in the Workplace Only
bakreule writes "Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! are teaming up to link their separate instant messaging services for use in the workplace, 'the first major step by the industry leaders to enable computer users to communicate with one another no matter which of the three systems they use.' Sound to good to be true? It is. 'What this does not do,' Root said (yes, that's his name), 'is the holy grail of instant messaging, which is to allow anybody on any network to send a message to anybody on any other network.' It seems that the system, which is aimed for corporations, involves some MS software which acts as an intermediary between the different systems. Sounds like a fancy version of all the open source IM clients out there."
Sounds like a fancy version of all the open source IM clients out there."
No, it doesn't sound like gaim or any other client. It sounds like a centralized control center for tighter watching over employee's IM conversations. gaim doesn't automatically forward my AIM messages to someone on MSN or Yahoo without me having an account on each. This seems like it would do that. gaim doesn't log all my conversations from all networks and store that information in one spot so that my boss can watch what I am sending across the networks.
Why does MSFT need to be the one doing this? How about an Open initiative that wouldn't require the three IM giants? It would likely be less money, better for the employers, and operate with more features and less bugs.
Too bad the employers only trust those that shouldn't be trusted.
Jabber is the holy grail of the IM.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I was a trillian user for two years and have now been a Gaim user for a year. The only thing that would change for me is the number of sockets that my computer would maintain.
I wonder if this movement would also spark a movement toward disabling 3rd-party clients. That would NOT be good.
Trillian
Gaim
More than enough BS
AOL-Yahoo-MSN Unified
Man I'd hate to see the baby.
My pics.
If gaim supported all this. My company standardized on Microsofts corporate IM system but all our operations people use linux exclusively. We use gaim to IM with each other but can't access the corporate IM system since there's currently no linux client that supports it...
My $0.02 ... Nate
They need to merge all of the IM services in the future, anyway. Having to hastle with 4 different messengers is a pain, regardless if you use the clients or not.
Imagine if you had to have four different telephones, one for each telephone system. No one would put up with that. No one at all, but everyone finds it the norm with messengers.
Oh well. Trillian rules for the time being.
ICQ is very popular among German youth. Last I saw, their registration numbers were past 250,000,000. I'm still using my 3,000,000 number ;)
"These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based upon the order in which I joined"
- Homer Simpson
More than enough BS
For the workplace? Great, integrate 3 different plain text protocols and ask your employees to do business over them.
I get the need for dominance, which is why interoperability is rarely persued by corporations, but IM itself would be best served as a 'generic' message medium. If it is impossible/difficult to IM 'Bill' 'cuz he uses Yahoo and I use MS, email/phone will normally get the nod.
To use the over-hyped XML paradigm, standard tags would allow every IM vendor to talk with each other. Then more would use IM, allowing the vendors to add features and lower pricing (economy of scale).
"This lays the groundwork for instant messaging to become as widespread and useful as e-mail is today," said Taylor Collyer
If it becomes as "widespread and useful as e-mail" then that means I'm going to have spam popping up on my screen every three seconds. Goodbye, Instant Messaging.
In any case, this is all nonsense. AOL, Yahoo, and The Beast should all just implement the server-to-server protocol used by Jabber. It's on the IETF standards track and will eventually be used by everyone who isn't one of those three.
Actually, if one of the big three (probably the smallest of the big three, whichever that is) implemented the protocol, the other two would pretty much have to.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Hello to all,
S ID =2517926c4f71caed9f6bff1af6843dbd
:)).
This is welcomed news, but the people at Jabber (http://www.jabber.com) did something like this first. Using a Jabber client you can talk to the three other networks by using an special plugin installed on the server (http://www.jabber.org/user/userguide/).
Also Jabber is a very extensible platform that can be used almost for anything (like System monitoring, for example):
http://www.jabber.org/about/overview.php?PHPSES
Also as the original poster mentions, Gaim already does this without problems (even when Yahoo decides to change their protocol, which is almost every 6 months
Regards,
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
net send is a source of great fun in an office full of morons.
Name your computer something ominous like "SYSTEM_KERNEL_DAEMON", then do some creative net sends, like:
net send * This machine has performed an illegal instruction and will self destruct in 45 seconds.
etc, etc, and so on.
Hours of fun for the whole family.
Or, when one new employee was fired around here, the next day I named my machine to his login id and sent some:
net send * You cant fire me! You are all fucked now! You'll be sorry!
And watched the panic stricken manager types run up and down the hall screaming "he's in the computer! he's in the computer!".
Aah.. Good times.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When I worked for a larger company we all used Lotus SameTime (often called sometime, as in it should work sometime), it worked quite well, and the integration between the client and corporate lists was really usefull.
IM clients are a happy comprimise between the phone and email. A phone nesesarily distracts the contactee from whatever they were doing, while many people only check for email every X minutes. An IM message doesn't have to pull them away from whatevery they are doing, and they can respond at an apropriate moment.
IM clients also provide more granular controll over your status, and display that status to others. With a phone you can answer, check call display and let voice mail handle it, or send all to voice mail. With IM you can be available, busy, do not disturb, away, etc. The fact that this is displayed to others can also allow them to make decisions on wether or not to bother you.
All in all I am glad to see greater acceptance of IM in the workplace
paul reinheimer
There are lots of really valid reasons that don't involve big brother for companies to keep an eye on IM communications. First off, I know people in my company who commit financial transactions for the company over IM. It's completely stupid that they do this, but they do it none the less. An audit trail for the company's money is required.
The second thing I can think of is corperate espionage. Companies spend lots of money on products that audit email leaving the company, looking for sensitive documents, key phrases, etc. We really need the same thing for IM, if it's going to be used in a business context for business data.
I'd also love to see a promise that the chanel between me and the person I'm talking to is encrypted. I can do that with email: force TLS encryption from my email gateway directly to theirs.
These are all good things, and don't get to the 'big brother' complaints. Those will be there, and I believe that there will always be a free IM without these auditing requirements for people who don't need them.
Zapman
*shrug* I only know of two cases here where people were disciplined for inappropriate emails here. In the firt case (admittedly before I got here), someone was sending out a mildly pornographic dominatrix video of a guy repeatedly getting kicked in the crotch by a lady in high-heeled boots with a subject title of "At least it's less painful than working here." It probably would have passed under the radar if the guy hadn't used the ML-ALL mailing list that included the general.
The other incident, the higher-ups found out due to word of mouth. With everyone talking, it was inevitable that eventually someone would notice. And so his email logs were requested and he was sent off for sensitivity training. *grumble* And then they went on a hyper-politically-correct workplace bent, making everyone remove pictures of wives and girlfriends from cubicle walls for fear that someone might find them offensive. Oh, the joys of federal government work...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
There is no reason at all that IM needs to rely on few corporate giants installing centralized IM hubs. The problem is self-created (out of an attempt to tie users into proprietary services).
The solution is simple: corporations wanting to use IM should take control of their IM infrastructure and install one of the open source IM systems (Jabber, IRC, etc.) on an external server, just like they install their own mail servers. Or they can outsource it to one of many hosting companies that support those services.
It's exactly like Jabber, only AOL, Yahoo, and MSN will provide their protocols, and tell each other when they change the protocols.
;-)
This already works in with Jabber, but the devs at Jabber, GAIM, and Trellian have to work together to reverse engineer every time AOL, or Yahoo, or MSN decide to change their protocol.
Now, I have to ask the question, how is this Open Source NOT being innovative?
Scott Carr
At least as far as it is possible to do what you're saying, Jabber does it. You can't communicate to anyone on Yahoo unless you yourself have a Yahoo ID, so Jabber makes you get one. Once you have a Yahoo ID or an ID on any other IM, Jabber lets you message to anyone on that IM directly from your Jabber account. It uses *exactly* the kind of aim:david address that you're talking about, using xml.
Until you get the IM services to accept a universal namespace and messages from another system, Jabber is as good as it gets.
This scenario and confusion is what email would have been like if standards weren't set and available for free use--imagine only being able to send an email to someone with the same service.
Instead, the selfless designers of internet protocols gave away their idea such that it could be implemented by anyone anywhere, and email is a valuable tool.
Compared to the greedy bastards that are trying to "own" IM, so the end result is that IM is barely more than a toy.
--
$tar -xvf
I'll be honest - I've used both, and while philosophically I leaned towards Miranda, I've given up on it.
Why?
Because on multiple occasions, I've reported bugs with great detail regarding issues with connectivity, and after six releases, the issues never got better.
As it is even today, I can load Trillian or Gaim and have no problem connecting to the four corporate networks, but Miranda WONT. Thats pitiful.
Thats why I switched to GAIM - There are *many* plugins and options I really miss from Miranda, but those don't come close to comparing to the simple issue of protocol support. If I cant chat, I cant use the features (duh).
I'm not alone in it either - the threads I reported my issues in became some of the most-responded-to threads they have.
Yet still no fix months later.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Although the article had just about zero details. My guess would be that Microsoft has simply convinced Yahoo and AOL (read: give big piles of cash to) to connect to the already existing Microsoft Live Communications Server.
I *think* that Live Communications Server uses "Session Initiation Protocol" which I *think* is a public standard. I would guess that, theoretically any IM client could implement it and connect to Live Communications Server. Although that is purely speculation, there might be licensing fees associated with SIP or Microsoft might have "adjusted" the standard in their own special way.
So why does Microsoft *want* Yahoo and AOL to integrate with Live Communications Server you ask? Probably because Microsoft's IM market share is so small that nobody really wants to use Live Communications Server. And really, there is not much money in basic instant messaging. However, at $700 for the server, and then an additional $25 per user on the server, there is a lot of money in Live Communications Server.
We recently installed the trial version and it's crap. The only real thing it gives over basic instant messaging is the ability to archive all messages on the server, which is a necessity for some business. Although they don't give you any way to search through archived messages, it's just a SQL database full of records. Not exactly worth $25 per person.
Google,
Many of my fellow slashdotters and I are patiently awaiting your unannounced release of your new Google Instant Messenger. Please release it as soon as possible.
Thanks,
Anonymous Coward
the tech dept at my school decided to forbid IM programs when they issued everyone with laptops because, of course, they're for academic use only! never mind that since everyone had a laptop, we were now forbidden to have personal computers in our rooms...so anyway, no IM for us. but there was net send, which they couldn't or didn't disable, so they simply forbade any of us to use it. we all ignored it, they attempted to crack down on it, etc. etc. so one evening during study hours, i needed the math hw from my friend and was waiting for her to send me back. ta-da, in walks my counselor. as jenny's msg pops up on my screen.
....
her: what's that?
me: it's a message from jenny.
her: huh?
me: i needed the math hw, so i net sent her about it.
her: what?
me: *sigh* we had that meeting, remember, when you said anyone using net send would get detention?
her: oh! is that what that is? how do you use it?
me: *proceed to show her the command prompt, etc.*
her: how interesting. ok, well...stop in my office tomorrow to discuss your punishment.
me:
*she leaves, i close my door and indulge in some loud and creative swearing*
so that's the story of how i showed my idiot bitch counselor how i was breaking the rules, and how i got detention for using net send.
You see who is currently online (the realtime bit), then decide on how you want to interact: voice, video or text. Easy-peasy. Except 1. it's part of AIM and 2. AIM on PCs doesn't do vid or voice.
So once again, it's the big boys trying to carve up their own piece of the internet. IT'S NOT REAL ESTATE, IT'S VIRTUAL ESTATE!
We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis