Carl Tyler's Blog

There's been a lot of discussion lately in the press, blogs and partner forums about the Microsoft announcement concerning IM interoperability.  I see this announcement as a good thing for all companies inolved with or using Instant Messaging.  From what I can tell the Microsoft solution will be a gateway interface, based around SIP but probably based around Microsoft's 'enhanced' SIP standard.  Yes they have already started to 'enhance and embrace' the SIP/SIMPLE protocol.

The gateway approach is the correct approach to take.  Client integration is fine, but typically requires users having a personal login to the other system, and corporations never really liked the idea of their employees using names like bigboy27 to chat with customers.  There are ways you can control this obviously, with products like IMtegrity which does Sametime and AOL chat logging/archiving and allows you to control who in your organisation can use AOL, so you can make sure they are only using an approved name.  If the IM gateways are done correctly, users will have a single logon to one system and gain access to the other systems without requiring logins for each individual user, another benefit of the gateway approach for an organisation is that they can lock down their firewall much more.

IBM has offered their SIP gateway for Sametime since 2.5, but the first couple of versions were very buggy and no one deployed them, in fact today many companies still haven't done much more than install it to see what it does.  The funniest thing that I come across with companies, is that they want to chat with IBM using SIP, but IBM hasn't implemented the SIP gateway, so most people that chat with IBMers over IM are using AOL.  If IBM implemented a SIP gateway for their Sametime infrastructure, I am sure you would see most IBM partners and customers setting up their own SIP gateways.

One thing that does become clear with all these systems finally starting to talk to each other, you unique ID, typically your email address is going to start getting used for much more than just email.  You email address will become your IM ID, your VoIP ID, your signon name, etc.