America Online took on another buddy in the instant messaging game. Lotus today announced that its Sametime 1.5 product interoperates with AOL's service.
This time, though, the buddy is friendly.
Lotus and AOL signed an agreement back in January to link their instant messaging products. The deal is in sharp contrast to the battle AOL has been fighting with Microsoft over the past couple of days on access to buddy lists.
Microsoft last week released MSN Messenger that lets users import their AOL buddy lists. AOL then blocked the feature by altering the protocol that provides access to its Instant Messenger. Microsoft found a way around the alteration only to have AOL block them a second time. Microsoft again found its way around the alteration.
Lotus, however, is in no such battle. With Lotus Sametime 1.5 the Sametime client supports the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) protocol. The feature allows Sametime users to import AOL buddy lists into their client and talk to those buddies online.
The fact that Lotus supports the AIM protocol and Microsoft supports a version of the same protocol, however, does not mean that the Lotus and Microsoft products can interoperate.
"We cannot connect to MSN, but we are working with Microsoft on an Internet Engineering Task Force standard protocol," says Bethann Cregg, senior manager for Sametime product marketing.
The IETF working group is called Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP).
"We haven't talked to Microsoft yet, but we are open to discussing what the vendors want to do," Cregg says. Prodigy and Yahoo offer similar services that have proprietary protocols. "Our assumption is that a standard is what the market will require," she says.
The prevailing belief is that the industry does want a standard for Instant Messaging, which now is mostly a consumer-based service. But the likes of Lotus and Microsoft are building the capabilities into their messaging and collaboration software for the enterprise. Interoperability will likely be a key demand if enterprise users adopt Instant Messaging.
"It's encouraging to see the cooperation between AOL and Lotus," says Mike Comiskey, an analyst with International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass. Comiskey says Microsoft's battle with AOL shows that Instant Messaging is gaining momentum. "It's becoming an accepted medium for messaging."
Lotus is trying to show that the service has advantages for the enterprise. The Sametime 1.5 server is scheduled to ship next month. It has an Instant Meeting feature that uses the server's Instant Messaging capabilities. Instant Meeting adds data conferencing-like capabilities where a user can instantly begin sharing applications or documents with another user just by drawing them into an Instant Meeting.
The service is kicked off with an Instant Message and once the user responds, an applet is automatically loaded into their browser to support the data conferencing. Once the applet is present, the user can share data with any number of users.
"We can create a data conferencing session on the fly," Cregg says.
The Sametime 1.5 server also adds tunneling capabilities for HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKs Version 4.0 and 5.0 in an attempt to extend Sametime services through corporate firewalls.
The Sametime 1.5 server is priced at $5,000. The client access license is $20 per user.
An extranet version of the server is priced at $10,000 and provides for an unlimited number of users.
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