By John
McCormick
Real-time chat and buddy lists will eventually enter the
workplace. But until a protocol standard is adopted, you’d be wise
to hold off.
Every
so often a technology comes along that gets branded as a business
tool but not a consumer product, or the other way around, and then
ends up being embraced by both markets. The PC is perhaps the best
example of this phenomenon. Originally considered a business tool,
it’s now almost as popular as TV sets.
The same thing is happening to instant messaging, but this time
the technology is moving from consumers to business. Created by
America Online for consumer chat rooms and buddy lists, instant
messaging lets people send text messages that pop up immediately on
the recipient’s screen. It also allows you to see who’s connected to
a network and accepting messages. The result is that a group of
people can check in with each other online and exchange messages in
real time.
Business can obviously benefit from this kind of communication.
But until recently, instant messaging products—called instant
messengers—haven’t been part of our collaborative toolkits. Perhaps
they’ve been too closely associated with AOL. But they’ve also
lacked security, scalability, and the protocol standards that
businesses require. Collaboration software vendors like Lotus have
started to address some of these problems and integrate the
technology into their product lines, but important technical issues
remain to be solved.
Buddy Lists
at Work?
As more
consumers go online to make purchases, send sales inquiries, or
otherwise communicate with businesses, they’re becoming frustrated
with e-mail because it locks them into a one-way conversation that
doesn’t produce immediate results. With a real-time technology like
instant messaging, however, they can immediately engage in a
conversation online, resolving questions and completing purchases
more quickly.
Instant messagers also gives the vendor a chance to pitch other
products, an opportunity currently lacking in most online
transactions. And the technology can improve online customer service
after the sale, too, by allowing businesses to better address
complex inquiries and deal with demanding customers.
Within the workplace, instant messaging can enhance communication
among team members in disparate locations. It isn’t always practical
or cost-effective to use a telephone, especially for brief
exchanges, such as to check a project’s status or confirm receipt of
a package. E-mail and bulletin boards work, but neither is real
time; e-mail users on the same server may enjoy nearly instant
delivery, but messages sent outside the LAN can sometimes take
several hours to arrive. For a quick exchange, instant messaging is
far better suited.
Instant messengers have awareness, an ability unavailable with
telephones or e-mail. Used in AOL buddy lists, awareness enables you
to find out who is online, or in the case of business users, who is
at their desks and available—to receive an instant message, an
e-mail, or even a phone call. Consider how often you’ve repeatedly
called someone only to find each time that he’s unavailable, and
you’ll understand the usefulness of this feature.
Now for the
Bad News
Now
that you know the advantages of instant messenging, I’ll tell you
the disadvantages. In the past, instant messengers have been
developed strictly for home use and therefore weren’t secure or
scalable. Businesses who cared about keeping their secrets and
conversing among large numbers of people couldn’t just grab an
off-the-shelf consumer product like AOL’s Instant Messenger.
Fortunately, vendors are addressing these shortcomings. Lotus’s
Sametime instant messenger, for example, offers three different
levels of security and is highly scalable (see page 58 of the
March/April issue for a review of Sametime 1.0).
The remaining barrier is that there isn’t a standard for
interoperability among the different messengers. Even if you want to
improve communication among only a small group of people now, sooner
or later you’ll want to collaborate with customers, partners, and
other outside contacts, and you can’t do that if everyone’s instant
messengers are incompatible. Furthermore, if you choose the wrong
instant messenger now, your investment might be rendered obsolete by
standardization on an incompatible protocol.
The Vendors
The
battle to determine a standard instant messaging protocol is
underway, and it’s no surprise that Microsoft is involved. What’s
unusual is that the software giant is in a position of weakness.
AOL, who created instant messaging, seems to hold the strongest
hand. AOL is bolstered by technology it gained from acquiring
Netscape and forming an alliance with Sun Microsystems. AOL Instant
Messenger has 43 million users, according to the company, by far the
most of any competitor, and 10 to 20 times that of Microsoft’s MSN
Messenger.
AOL is also recruiting a lot of powerful allies. The list is a
who’s who of companies that have at one time or another been
trampled by Microsoft:
- Starting with perhaps the most significant, AOL has agreed to
integrate its Instant Messenger with Novell’s new Novell Directory
Services (NDS). AOL’s product can benefit from the security
and control offered by NDS. And Novell is sure to remain a
committed ally because it has pinned its future to the performance
of NDS, which lists Microsoft’s Active Directory as its biggest
competitor.
- Sun Microsystems is another obvious ally. It gained
Netscape—now-AOL—technology from its alliance with AOL. And its
recent skirmishes with Microsoft over Java give it good reason to
side against its chosen enemy.
- Apple has agreed to provide an instant messenger that would
provide seamless communication between Mac users and the AOL
Instant Messenger.
- An agreement with Lotus ensures that Sametime 1.5 is
compatible with AOL’s product. It’s worth noting, however, that
Lotus has also publicly claimed that Sametime will support any
accepted industry standards, presumably including one driven by
Microsoft.
- AOL has teamed with several ISPs, such as Voyager.net and Juno
Online Services, adding their customers to its ever-growing
installed base.
Of course, Microsoft has its own band of supporters, including
most of the other instant messenger vendors, including Yahoo!,
Activerse, and Tribal Voice. These companies have all tried to
access and thus steal from AOL’s huge base of users, but AOL
continues to break any compatibility with its Instant Messenger that
other companies are able to produce. Also, Microsoft has enlisted
several of AOL’s competitors in the online service provider market,
including AT&T, Prodigy, and Excite@Home.
The Internet Engineering Task Force is currently working to pass
a standard known as the Instant Messaging/Presence Protocol (IMPP),
and Microsoft and its cohorts are pushing hard to make this happen
(in a somewhat two-faced move against AOL, Lotus has been part of
this effort, too). To ensure that the adopted standard is closely
compatible with its own products, Microsoft has even published its
MSN Messenger protocol so third parties can develop compatible
instant messengers, the idea being that the more widely used a
protocol, the greater the chance it will be adopted as
standard.
|
America Online Instant Messenger |
Microsoft MSN Messenger |
Players |
|
|
Advantage |
- Installed base of 43 million users
- Strong combination of technology from many
partners
- Absolute control of access to AOL’s users
| |
- Microsoft’s ability to influence standards
- The ability to match the AOL side’s technology
arsenal
- Microsoft’s winning record in standards
fights
| |
What’s
Available?
Early
in September, AOL announced a partnership with FaceTime
Communi-cation, which is using Instant Messenger technology to
develop an interface that allows companies to use instant messaging
for online customer service. Soon also to appear in forthcoming
business products will be MSN Messenger, which is already integrated
with Microsoft’s other communication tools, including Outlook
Express, NetMeeting, and Hotmail. In addition, Microsoft plans to
make its instant messenger client available on handheld devices,
allowing such miniature PCs with Internet access to function as a
two-way pager.
So far, however, the most complete business-focused instant
messaging product is Sametime from Lotus. Sametime includes not only
instant messaging and awareness, but an electronic whiteboard, where
conference participants can see each others’ marks on a white
screen, and application sharing, where participants can see and even
control applications being run on other machines. Sametime 1.5,
which was released in late July, added several key features,
including interoperability with the AOL Instant Messenger, an
improved development toolkit for creating instant messenger
applications, message encryption, and real-time monitoring of online
users and message delivery.
For Domino users, Sametime offers special advantages in that it
can be integrated with Domino mail, allowing users to respond to
e-mail with instant messages. Sametime also uses a Domino directory
structure, sparing administrators from having to maintain a separate
directory.
Sametime server pricing starts at $5,000, retail. Sametime client
access licenses start at $20 per user.
Good Things
Come to Those Who Wait
It’s
surprising that instant messengers have taken so long to find their
way into businesses. Being able to exchange text messages in real
time and knowing when someone is at his desk are obvious advantages.
Add the electronic whiteboard and application sharing available with
Sametime, and you have a truly compelling product for team
collaboration, customer relationship management, and e-commerce.
As with other emerging technologies, however, current instant
messengers are a long way from being trouble-free. Security and
scalability have been addressed, but it’s too soon to guess who’s
going to win the standards battle. Normally, I’d say that it’s
whatever side Microsoft is on, but in this case Redmond may have met
its match. AOL Instant Messenger has strong allies and 43 million
users. But Lotus is straddling the fence and Microsoft is not to be
underestimated. Fortunately, with all the pressure being applied to
the Internet Engineering Task Force, we can expect a standards
recommendation before the end of the century.
JOHN McCORMICK is the software and Internet research manager for
SECTORBASE.com, a San Francisco-based Internet company that provides
stock market information to financial analysts. E-mail: jmccormick@SECTORBASE.COM. |