IBM Brings IM Together 47
An anonymous reader writes "At their Lotusphere conference, IBM announced IM interoperability with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo!, and Google Talk, to be shipped in the next release of its Sametime enterprise IM/web conferencing product in mid-2006." The omission of Microsoft's instant messenger seemed to raise quite a few questions, however.
ICT? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bit of a resource hog but it is pretty nice.
If they are releasing this for public consumption I think it would be a good idea.
Re:Already here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already here (Score:3, Interesting)
Let see, we already have all this with Trillian and Adium. Why do I need IBM doing it?
The difference is one is a client and one is a server/service. Ideally, IM will become like e-mail using standard protocols. Anyone can check any server using any client. In the beginning this was not the case, until the major players agreed to start using standards. Now you can use mutt or outlook access e-mail from AOL or Comcast using SMTP and POP hosted on Sendmail or Communigate.
This is IBM saying that their service and servers and client will all start recognizing the SIP standard. This means you can get messages from users of IBM's service even if you are using Trillian with your AIM account. Further, if you are using IBM's service, you won't need to sign up for multiple accounts with AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. to be able to chat with people using those services. With Google, IBM, AOL, Yahoo all starting to provide interoperability we are finally starting to get out of walled gardens and moving towards open, interoperable standards. This is very good news for anyone who uses IM and would like it to be more useful and have more possible people they can contact and it is good news for people running secure IM servers using IBM software. They will not be able to communicate with the outside world.
Note, all of this excepts MSN who don't believe in open standards of communication or something.