Christopher Saunders

America Online is moving quietly into video messaging by implementing a “push-to-talk”-like service — a move that circumvents controversial government limitations on the company’s multimedia IM capabilities. Currently in beta testing, the new AOL feature will enable the service’s subscribers to activate an additional pane on their IM client. Within that pane, users can record […]

Despite rumors about another delay in shipping its “Greenwich” server, Microsoft says the product is on schedule — and in the meantime, is concentrating on making its sales pitch for the technology as competitors ready their own offerings. The “Microsoft Real-Time Communications Server 2003 Standard Edition,” as the product formerly codenamed “Greenwich” is to be […]

Continuing efforts by the major players in enterprise solutions to tie instant messaging into other collaborative solutions, Sun Microsystems is taking off the wraps off an improved version of the company’s IM platform, in connection with a new release of its Sun ONE Collaborative Business Platform. Due to launch formally in May, Sun ONE Instant […]

Collaboration is shaping up to be the name of the game this year for a number of the largest enterprise software vendors. IBM Lotus is already embarking on a strategy to share Sametime IM and collaboration services with its other applications; Oracle’s application server group and Sun’s Web portal unit each are gearing up to […]

Momentum continues among providers in the white-hot instant messaging application interface space, as two players release new interactive agent — or “bot” — offerings that link IM to enterprise apps and backend databases. One of those firms, New York-based ActiveBuddy— which popularized the public-network IM bot field with agents it deployed on behalf of marketers, […]

In the first major victory for the large public instant messaging players’ push to gain credibility in the B2B market, Hewlett-Packard has agreed to resell and integrate America Online’s enterprise-class instant messaging product into its own offerings.Two months ago, Dulles, Va.-based AOL, a unit of AOL Time Warner , introduced the Enterprise AIM Gateway, a […]

The last 12 months have seen sweeping changes filtering through the world of instant messaging, with a tightened focus on enterprise-class services and a number of new products entering the field. Now, industry insiders predict a number of new developments in the IM arena — all of which have major implications for vendors, IT managers, […]

Enterprise software giant Oracle is aiming to go head-to-head with Microsoft and Lotus in collaboration tools, launching a new suite of services that includes a host of instant messaging and related applications. The product, Oracle Collaboration Suite Release 2, includes the company’s first real-time messaging services, adding on to the combined voicemail, e-mail and fax […]

Microsoft Corp.’s MSN unit is preparing what will likely be the initial stage in the software giant’s play for the enterprise instant messaging market. Dubbed MSN Messenger Connect, and slated for launch next quarter, the product provides for company-controlled “namespaces,” so a business can administer its own instant messaging usernames. That means that a company […]

After months of speculation, AOL Time Warner’s America Online unit has taken the wraps off its enterprise instant messaging solution. The offering adds proxy-based management tools on top of the media and Internet giant’s free, wildly popular public service, AIM. Indeed, Enterprise AIM’s use of the same client for public AIM is a key selling […]