When IBM acquired Lotus it brought several software products on board amongst which was Sametime, an instant messaging tool targeted, and now the undisputed market leader in the enterprise messaging space. Analysts estimate that Sametime controls between 60-75 percent of the enterprise market, with penetration even higher among larger organizations.
And while other Lotus products have struggled in the Internet era, Sametime (now rebranded as Lotus Instant Messaging) has continued to bring in revenues and hold the competitors at bay.
At IBM’s annual PartnerWorld conference, iSeries General Manager Al Zollar unveiled IBM Community Tools, an integrate suite of messaging and broadcast messaging tools — showing that IBM now seeks to further extend its online community strategy and market dominance.
Though IBM has played down the commercial opportunities that IBM Community Tools offers, these ‘experimental’ applications stem from a position of strength and the possibilities to win further business in the lucrative corporate world.
The IBM Community Tools (ICT) are intended to explore new ways that large companies communicate and interact, especially in scenarios between partners and trusted third parties. Since their initial release, ICT have now been repolished, after a summer of tweaking and refinement, and released on the AlphaWorks site, a specialized portal dedicated to IBM R&D projects. The reception by the development fraternity has been mostly positive.
What are the IBM Community Tools?
The heart of ICT is its Broadcast Suite, which is composed of five web applications that allow you to broadcast one-to-many messages across online communities.
IBM fondly refers to these as “Instant Messaging on Steroids”; the suite was based on the concept of communities, with each tool focusing on a specific Instant Messaging activity. Pollcaster, for example, lets you run poll in real-time and gather feedback from ‘anonymous’ users within the community.
However, ICT is not by any means a new product; the new tools sits on top of several existing communications tools that already exist across unrelated IBM product suites.
ICT brings together the IBM MQ Event Broker’s one-to-many broadcast messaging technologies, instant messaging capabilities from IBM Lotus Sametime’s, web services running on WebSphere Application Server, the Apache application server and the DB2 database. An IBM eServer iSeries 820 hosts the ICT applications.
The aim of the tool is to lets enterprise user interact in pre-defined communities, (for example with a group of trusted partners), in a peer-to-peer network with advanced instant and broadcast messaging. By using this client-side broadcast messaging you can to locate specialists, start discussions, and survey large groups instantly—all in real time.
Stu Feldman, a vice president with IBM’s Internet technology group, emphasized that this is still an “experimental technology” and that the decision to release it to the AlphaWorks community was mostly to get rapid feedback from these user groups. IBM says that it plans to roll out ICT across a university environment to see how students (i.e. a different target group) take to the tools.
The ICT Broadcast Suite is a collection of five applications:
1. FreeJam is for holding ‘just-in-time’ discussions with community members, and comes bundled with an interesting transcription feature. If you enter an exchange that’s already in progress, you can scroll down and read what was said before you joined. This is an improvement on other IM product, where if you entered mid-discussion, you have no idea what had been said.
2. Pollcast allows you to poll the community and receive survey results back in real-time; these can be sent from ‘anonymous’ users who don’t want their identity revealed. The Pollcast setting lets you choose the time limit for a poll, and the type of reply, including multiple choice, text reply, or Yes or No options. Results appear instantly with bar graphs, percentages, and a variety of options.
3. SkillTap instantly broadcast questions or queries to community members. There are two sides to every SkillTap: Broadcaster and Responder. When you broadcast a SkillTap request, you select the appropriate community. Then, if you want to respond, a chat window opens the discussion between the responder and broadcaster. When the discussion is over the Responder receives a window that allows them to qualify the session—the Responder can also add their session as an FAQ—while the Broadcaster can rate the help they were given.
4. TeamRing lets you make a web based presentation online. TeamRing is at its most useful when used in conjunction with a conference call or if you launched a FreeJam in conjunction with your TeamRing and entered a chatroom to discuss the presentation.
5. W3alert sends and receives alert to members, and can include URL links to websites. This is ideal in situations when you want to send out a quick message; for example, to warn users of a potential email virus.
There are three additional mini applications: Alert Manager allows you to setup where, how, and when you receive alerts; Instant Messaging Hub is for discussing topics with partners and groups; Question Search lets you search numerous knowledge-bases using natural language and then receive answers ranked by relevance.
Wireless users will be pleased that the new release includes a client for running IBM Lotus Instant Messaging on a PDA.
For an R&D project, IBM has made significant investments into this product. The ICT website, (http://community.ngi.ibm.com), has an excellent Flash online demo that walks you through the tools and their respective functionality. Kudos must go to the IBM graphic design team for creating a slick interface that would make even the most ardent Apple fans envious.
Filtering Alerts and Messages
Amongst the most powerful features are the filtering capabilities. When you register for IBM Community Tools on one of the participating portals, you select the topics in which you’re interested; messages and polls are then filtered to include only those topics.
To control the types of broadcasted alerts that appear on your screen, the filter setting gives your three options:
- Adaptive Filtering is an intelligent filter that learns from you over time. If you select the “learning mode” option, all messages will be shown allowing you to teach the filter your interests.
- Manual Filtering is where you specify the filter explicitly. It can be a list of words, or a regular expression that you want filtered. You can choose to view only the alerts that contain the words in your list, for example, Asian Financial News, or view only the alerts that do not contain any of the words in your list.
- No Filtering has no filtering applied. You get everything!
First Steps with iSeries Nation
IBM eSeries customers and business partners were the first to use the ICT tools.
The two-year old iSeries Nation community group is comprised of almost 50,000 iSeries customers, business partners, and independent software vendors. IBM has used this Internet-based user group as a test bed to examine both the acceptance for the applications and also to build its value as a collaboration device.
More recently, IBM put the applications on the heavily trafficked AlphaWorks community to get it quickly into the developer domain and let them test-drive it.
Though the number of downloads has not been released, this process allows the IBM WebAhead team to collect feedback and roll these observations into the next release.
In addition, by publishing it on AlphaWorks, IBM can observe how large groups of users interact, share real-time knowledge, and study the behavioral patterns that arise.
Thorny Issues
Instant messaging has long been touted as the next ‘killer app’. And like email, its achilles heel is security. Though ICT offers a powerful platform to communicate in real-time with community members, the bulletin boards and discussion forums have voiced considerable concerns about the security limitations.
John Brandt, Vice President of technical services at iStudio400.com, believes that that security will the greatest barrier to implementation, and adds, “With the most common desktop and server implementations currently running Windows, the security risks are difficult, if not impossible to completely mitigate. This is not due to the product, but the underlying OS. If the product was seamlessly integrated with firewalls and virus detection software as well as connectivity tunneling and encryption, those issues might be “dumped” on the “OS”.
Instant messaging tools could open doors to intruders, compromising system security and reeking havoc ‘in real-time’. In addition, as most businesses are behind firewalls this will most likely restrict port availability
The thorny issue regarding ports means that some users can’t use ICT at work and only from home, which essentially defeats the whole purpose of communicating with your peer communities in real-time; in other words, you couldn’t run a real-time Pollcast, as everyone will have gone home.
System Administrators will be reluctant to support ICT because of the security exposures that opening ports can reveal; ICT support Socks 4/5, which many users do not have available.
In its current incarnation, ICT is not designed for usage in a highly secure environment—it requires newsgroup and Sametime access—whose TCP ports are closed in many companies.
Contributors on the ICT newsgroup argue that while they can access Hotmail from behind a firewall by using HTTP proxy, they can’t access ICT, which they find perplexing.
To illustrate the connectivity issues, those sitting behind a firewall need to open these ports on their firewall:
- 80, 443 – Standard HTTP/HTTP – need to be able to connect to community.ngi.ibm.com
- 1506 – MQ Event Broker – needs to be able to connect to brokers.ngi.ibm.com
- 1533 – Sametime – this port is used to connect to Instant Messaging Hub.
Support for HTTP proxies is not yet available
The WebAhead team acknowledges other issues such as ICT’s tendency to consume an excessive amount of memory when sitting at an idle state waiting for message. One ICT user reports that ICT is using 43,156KB of memory on a 512MB system; ICQ has a passive footprint of only 5,092KB. Instability is another issue; the system tends to hang after several hours of using ICT, though recent posts suggest that this is now remedied.
WebAhead, the Connecticut-based software firm, developed the tools and are working on the issues as they are captured.
New Product Development
ICT has real commercial opportunities; it could either be sold as a standalone application, white-labelled, or integrated with other IBM products. Other voices have proposed that it be released as open source.
For now though it seems that ICT has no defined product development plan. In fact, IBM has suggested that instead of ICT becoming a standalone product, it could end up influencing another product, or becoming a new service.
Feldman has emphasized that despite the positive response, IBM has made no commitment to roll ICT out as a product.
John Brandt adds that, “if IBM does it right, they will keep it out of any of the “Branding”. If they don’t, current version of the world will have it getting the “WebSphere” name, if the politics overrule common sense. If common sense were to rule, it would keep its own name, become an advertising or paid subscription type service.”
He suggests that every system IBM delivers should have ICT installed to allow desktop support, server support, software and hardware updates and services integrated into the product—a more sophisticated version of “Windows Update.”
The Heat Is On
The instant messaging race continues to heat up, and IBM will face continued competition from current rival AOL Time Warner and Microsoft.
AOL Time Warner is preparing corporate versions of its popular Instant Messenger service. As uptake for ISP subscriptions bottoms out, AOL plan to win a bigger share of the enterprise market with various Internet-related products.
Microsoft has promoted a proxy solution that provides tools to administer MSN Messenger from behind firewalls. Microsoft also has cross-selling and marketing expertise in these areas; for example, when you download Microsoft’s products to play videos, they capture the data and resell it to other merchants.
More significantly, Microsoft’s Real-Time Communications Server is due for release later this year. This will provide for secure, enterprise instant messaging and presence and serve as a platform for emerging communications technologies, such as Internet telephony, application sharing, and video conferencing.
New entrants Yahoo! have developed Business Messenger with partners, FaceTime Communications, WebEx, and IMlogic. This product comes with encryption and namespace support. And going one better than ICT, you can access it beyond your firewall. McDonalds, Bayer, and Honeywell among others have all signed up to the product.
It remains to be seen where ICT’s next move takes it File-transferring capabilities and video integration will differentiate it from other plain vanilla instant messaging tools, as well as running ICT on Linux. For Instant Messaging users and developers alike, this product has raised the bar to new heights.
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