Christopher Saunders

In keeping with tradition, the onset of January is greeted with a flurry of activity in athletic clubs and health food stores as people attempt to shed holiday pounds, and, more importantly, to start off the new year on the right foot. In that spirit, InstantMessagingPlanet.com unveils its primer on best practices in workplace instant […]

Pundits will probably look back on 2003 — at best — as a year of very conservative growth for the instant messaging industry. But those in the trenches this year deserve a good deal of congratulations. Despite long sales cycles and continued strain on IT budgets, the space experienced some of its largest product launches […]

America Online is poised to unveil the next version of its client software, and which includes an enhancement to its built-in instant messaging that offers streaming videoconferencing. The Dulles, Va.-based Internet giant, a unit of New York media conglomerate Time Warner , plans to launch the next version of its flagship client software, codenamed Tahiti, […]

IBM’s Lotus Software unit next week plans to reveal the next wave in its “Workplace” strategy, introducing a slew of additions to its enterprise instant messaging and collaboration offerings. For the uninitiated, “Workplace” represents both a concept and a specific brand of Lotus solutions. Those solutions are all based on a Java 2 Enterprise Edition […]

Facing pressure to protect users from spam and virus attacks using the built-in Windows Messenger Service, Microsoft and America Online each are taking new steps to safeguard users’ PCs. The rarely-used Messenger Service — not to be confused with the Redmond, Wash. software vendor’s Windows XP instant messaging client of the same name — is […]

Spurred to action by guidelines issued by organizations like the National Association of Securities Dealers and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wall Street firms have taken the lead in investing in logging, auditing, and management solutions for public IM, as well as their own standalone IM servers. A number of firms in healthcare, too, have […]

It’s finally here: Microsoft’s long-awaited, hotly anticipated, and frequently renamed enterprise instant messaging platform/solution, Office Live Communications Server 2003. Known as “Greenwich” during development, the product officially became Real-Time Communications Server 2003 in May. But Microsoft switched gears shortly thereafter, tweaking the product’s name — which became Office Real-Time Communications Server 2003 — to emphasize […]

Far from being an end unto itself, instant messaging is proving to be just the starting point for real-time communications in the enterprise. That’s the philosophy shared by two new solutions in the IM space. Internet telephony player eDial is taking the wraps off its new collaboration product that merges instant messaging, Web conferencing, and, […]

Continuing its efforts to interoperate with leading public and enterprise instant messaging providers, Reuters has signed an agreement to link its IM network with Microsoft’s MSN network, say sources close to the financial services information giant. The deal, expected to be announced tomorrow, is similar to an earlier arrangement with America Online. The unit of […]

The deadline for switching to the latest version of its instant messaging software having come and gone, Yahoo! has booted users of third-party IM clients off its instant messaging network. Earlier this month, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal began sending warnings about required upgrades to users of older versions of its Yahoo! Messenger IM client. […]