News and views on IM, Presence and RTC Technologies

..... my blog :-)

Over the last week or so I have been talking with some of the guys over in Redmond who would like to take over this blog and start two way communication between customer/partners and the product group rather than just via the field.  I personally think this is a great idea,  it can only make the product better and I am surprised its taken this long.

I have been assured that once I find a new home for my blog that not only will they create a link to my new home but also keep to with the spirit of why this blog was created in the first place.  As I said at the beginning, the purpose of this blog is to hopefully educate and stimulate the minds of those who are not yet convinced and to further the interest and knowledge of those that have already taken the leap into the world of Real Time Collaboration.

Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office Communicator for windows mobile phones has reached its first beta.  I dont know at the minute if there are any public betas available or if its just and FYI from the product team but as soon as I know otherwise I will post something up here.

I have installed this on my own Windows Mobile 5 device and it has been working well and seems pretty stable although I am sure after a few days I will start to bump into some bugs. 

I personally think this is a great step forward for our RTC technologies because it means users can set their presence, check others presence and gain access to all the benefits of Communicator without the need to be 'attached' to their laptop.  Personally for me this means that I can log onto Communicator now when I am on the train into/out of London, going for lunch in the canteen or anywhere else with a signal for that matter.  Some would say this is a bad thing but the way I look at it is that people are going to try and get hold of me anyway and I would rather channel that communication via my IM client than another email in my mailbox or cope with voicemail tennis.

So,  exciting news in the world of RTC I am sure you will agree and I look forward to telling you more about the mobile communicator and communicator web access when I have more information 

Over the last week or so some changes have been made to the Public IM Connectivity connector to expand the number and type of people that you can add to your contact list if your company subscribes to PIC.

Previously,  it was only possible to add addresses that end in @yahoo.com, @aol.com and @hotmail.com (and relevent other hotmail addresses).  One of the big problems with the previous PIC configuration was that it did not allow for passport addresses that were unsual.  When I say unusual I mean yourname@personalemail.com,  the problem with an address like this is that PIC didnt know whether to send it to MSN,  Yahoo or AOL.  This has been solved now so all you need to do is add the contact as yourname(personalemail.com)@msn.com and it works :-).

This is great news and if you only ever want to talk with work contacts it essentially means you have no need to have MSN Messenger or any IM client on your desktop except Communicator.

Enjoy !

There is a new worm circulating round the Microsoft IM world called Kelvir-ASVID which is a variant of the Kelvir worm.  On September 9th it started to work its way round the Reuters instant messaing platform.

This is seems to be an every increasing issue in the world of instant messaging as virus writer move from using email as a mode of transport to using IM platforms as the means to distribute themselves.  It is fortunate however that currently the large IM services e.g. AOL, MSN and Yahoo have little or no cross platform support so this has kept most virus' contained although I personally think that as we move towards using SIP across all the services and then start to provide connectors between the services that this could become more of a problem. 

For those of you that are looking to deploy Live Communicator Server I would not let this outbreak affect your decision to purchase or not.  Virus' will always be a problem and with the right design,  deployment and relevent secuirty measures it is possible to make your IM infrastructure secure.  I recommend taking a look at the security paper on http://www.microsoft.com/livecomm for more information.

It has been announced today that MSN and Yahoo are going to enable federation between their consumer IM services allowing MSN and Yahoo users to talk to their friends on the competing comsumer client without having to install the client themselves.

This functionality have been around for a while with LCS 2005 and Public IM Connectivity (PIC) but until now it has not been possible to do this in the consumer space.

With this alliance between MSN and Yahoo it will be interesting to see what happens with AOL and Google,  especially the latter as there has already been speculation about a joint venture of some sort between Microsoft and AOL. 

Take a look at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112907349731466067.html for more information

Yesterday Microsoft announced it was going to aquire Teleo,  a company that specialises in voice over IP software and services.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/aug05/09-30MSNTeleoPR.mspx

At the minute is looks as if this aquisition will enable PC to Phone calls via MSN Messenger but I do wonder if it could be adapted and made to work for LCS too.  In the end it will depend on the pricing and the underlying technology but it is certainly something worth pondering for a while :-)

I have been away for a few weeks so sorry this is being posted so late.

It appears that ebay is going to buy Skype (see http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1857847,00.asp?kc=ewnws091205dtx1k0000599) which seems like a very interesting move in the world of collaboration.  As yet there is little information on what they are going to be using it for so it will be interesting to see what develops over the next few months.

Will keep you posted !

Around the same time as Google were launching their new client, MSN have done a more stealthy launch of their new MSN Messenger 7.5 client.  I am finding it hard to remember what exactly was new in the client as I have been beta testing it for quite a while but the main features include

• New style login page
• The ability to set your status before you log on - We have been able to do this in Office Communicator for quite a while now but its good to see that we can also do the same in MSN Messenger
• Send voice clips - Ability to send a short voice clip to the user on the other end

The idea of ‘voice clips’ is the most interesting of all of these features because it blurs the line between sending an IM and phoning someone even more.  Just like in the world of mobile phones where some countries have moved from SMS texts to Push to talk, are we going to see the same happen with instant messaging where we move from text based IMs to voice clips sent via your IM client?

There certainly are times when these voice clips will come in use, in particular those time when you want to fire over a lengthy question to someone but you don’t want to spend the time typing it or you feel that it just wouldn’t get across as you intended.  There are times however when it wouldn’t be appropriate,  for example if you were in a meeting and you need to ask someone else a question,  sending a voice clip could be quite distracting for everyone in the room.  Like any of these technologies, there is no predefined way in which you should use the different aspects of the technology and only time will tell if it’s a success and where it fits in in the whole range of communication methods.

As well as keeping this blog up to date with all thats new in RTC I thought it might be useful to include any tips, tricks or hints I come across that I think might be useful to know.

If you want to find out the ports used by Windows Messenger for instant messaging,  file transfer,  audio and video then take a look at the following article on the Microsoft site

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;903056

This week saw the launch of Google Talk, Google’s first attempt at producing an IM solution for consumers.  From what I have heard it is based on Jabber which to me seems an interesting route to take while the other big three (MSN, AOL, Yahoo) and other collaboration technologies look to be moving towards using SIP.

It was indeed inevitable that Google would go down the instant messaging and voice chat router eventually as any good portal company has to cover services like web search, maps, email and instant messaging.  One of the things they need to ensure they do well is to show users why they should switch to Google Talk from their current client,  what is going to me the killer feature they have that no-one else has?,   as yet I have not managed to figure out what that is. 

Google Talk doesn’t appear to have things like tickers or emoticons and has a reliance on all of it users having GMail accounts.  This could be a problem for them at a later date as all of the other clients allow your IM presence to match your main email address e.g. bob@bobscompany.com.  Allowing people to have the same IM address and email address allows other to contact you easily and is more important than you would think at the start.  Forcing people to have a GMail account sort of breaks the mould and might stop people from taking up their service.

All this however turns into something a lot more interesting when we ask the question “will Google Talk ever go into the enterprise”.  The current thinking is that just like their search appliance devices, Google may look to run Google Talk on an appliance box in the enterprise space.  Only time will tell if this ever comes about J.

Before I start to share my views and any news about IM, Presenance and RTC Technologies in general I wanted to give you an idea of why this blog exists.

Over that last 10 years or so, computers and the internet have become a part of everyones life both at home and at work and this connected world has had a strange affect on the way we communicate with each other and how we gain access to information.  For example, before the time of the internet, if you wanted to find out the number of a reputable boiler man you would have to pick up the local telephone directory,  thumb through the pages and base yoru choice on the size of their advert and how nice they sounded on the phone.  Then along came the internet and changed things, now if you want to find the number of a reputable boiler man you take a look on your favourite search engine e.g. search.msn.co.uk, type in your location and ‘boiler man’ and you are presented with a list.  You can then use this list and possibly comments and feedback from previous customers to pick the guy you want to use.  The access to the internet has now given us access to a lot more information then you ever had before, more than you could ever hope to consume in fact, all you need to do is open the browser on your desktop.  But too much information at your finger tips can be a bad thing sometimes so we need to find a better way of getting the right information at the right time.

If we take this theme into the workplace and instead of trying to find out who can fix your boiler you’re now trying to find out last months revenue figures or what the availability of your messaging consultant is then this is a different matter.  Up until recently, this communication was done over email which allowed you do send requests for information out to a number of people at once, it didn’t take us long to see that this wasn’t the best way of finding out information quickly.  Enter presence based communication via IM.  Now when I am in the office and I need to find out something urgently,  such as a product release date for a presentation I am doing, I instant message the people I think will know the answer based on whether they’re available or not.  This is far more efficient than email, saves flooding people inboxes and ensures I get the answer quicklyJ.

However, this vision of the world I have is not the same as everyone else’s of course, so the purpose of this blog is to hopefully educate and stimulate the minds of those who are not yet convinced and to further the interest and knowledge of those that have already taken the leap into the world of Real Time Collaboration.

So, it’s over to you now.  I will try and keep this blog up to date with important news and announcements in the world of Real Time Collaboration but if there is anything you would like to see or know more about them please give me a shout and I will do my best J