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In the new world order of instant messaging (IM), the revered buddy list of contacts will soon be replaced by "presence awareness," or so says IBM Corp., which announced upgrades to Lotus Sametime 3 messaging and conferencing server during a recent press event in Cambridge, Mass.
Big Blue also released Lotus Notes and Domino 6; QuickPlace 3, a Web tool for team collaboration; Lotus Web Conferencing, a hosted pay-per- month service; and Learning Space, an expansion of e-learning and virtual classroom capabilities.
But it was Sametime 3 that IBM was touting the heaviest. With the new IM gateway, companies are now able to exchange instant messages between the diverse instant messaging community, company officials said. There is one catch: this can only be accomplished so long as all users are using the recently approved session initiation protocol (SIP) for IM called SIP for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions (SIMPLE). Both IBM and Microsoft Corp. are shipping SIMPLE-based software, and despite the fact that the IETF approved the standard in January, not all vendors - most notably AOL - will likely offer products based on the standard.
As organizations continue to find ways to trim excess overhead costs, IBM used itself as a case study to demonstrate potential cost savings by using IM internally. Based on approximately...