The next step in voice and data convergence is to develop real-time applications. Selling a voice-over-IP system is often just the beginning of a long-lasting and profitable solution for many VARs and systems integrators. One of the next steps in that process entails understanding how to develop real-time applications that can take advantage of voice and data convergence.

These often go by the term “presence-aware,” meaning that the application understands what users are actually doing, including when they are busy on a phone call or away from their desks.

You can read the entire article for eWeek’s Strategic Partner issue here.

Enterprise IM Strategies

Enterprises are coming to terms with Instant Messaging (IM), finding that it has become the best way to accelerate new forms of collaboration and communication among their distributed workforces and stay productive as email inboxes swell with spam. For some companies, email has become the new snail mail. But before you bite the IM bullet, here are some questions to answer to formulate your potential IM strategy for your corporation.

Read the complete story in Computerworld here.

Texting as the New Digital Divide

I never thought when my mother first taught me touch typing back in elementary school that the skill would turn out to be anything but useful, but lately I am not so sure. There is a new digital divide coming, and it concerns those of us that can text and those that are still stuck in the 90s typing on our PCs.

I look with longing at the teens and 20-somethings that can compose long odes on their cell phones with ease. I think all those years messing with QWERTY and look where it has gotten me – an aging PC user who, like Scotty in the second (or was it thirdfourth) Star Trek movie, has to grab a keyboard to get anything really useful done on a computer. And I am sure that reference alone will date me anyway.

My attempts at texting usually are done in the presence of a member of the younger generation and usually end in dismal failure, when said youngster will grab my phone from me and with a few clicks of the buttons finish the message that has taken me several (seeming) hours to compose. I know my mom would be turning over in her grave seeing me struggle – she was proud of my typing skills back in the day. Now they don’t even teach “typing” anymore. Sigh.

Yes, cell phones and PDAs now come with their own keyboards, and some of them you can actually type things in if you have small enough fingers or are patient and careful. But texting, sending short SMS messages via your phone, is even better, because you can do it to just about anyone with a phone and your correspondents can immediately send you back a pithy reply – if they are adept at texting, that is.

These days email is too slow – imagine waiting an hour or more before someone can compose and reply. It seems so quaint now. “You know, junior, back when I was young we thought it was pretty cool when we could email someone around the world and get an answer the Very Next Day!” And Instant Messaging isn’t instant enough – you still need a PC or something like it to really manage your buddy list that quickly grows into the multiple dozens. Yes, today’s divide is all about immediate gratification, and communication. Delays of a few seconds just won’t do.

I came to this sad (at least, sad for me) conclusion this week when I was attending the New Communications Forum in Vegas this week, talking about the latest tech with podcasters, corporate bloggers, and other geeks extraordinaire. I witnessed a demo of Twitter, which is one of those texting apps that you put on your cell phone and you can tell a couple dozen of your closest friends exactly what you are doing at any given moment of the day, or night. Why bother going to sleep, when you can keep up with the ‘hood? Who needs reality TV anymore, when we can manufacture our own so easy?

It is ironic that I came to this conclusion in Vegas. I mean, here I sit on a bench next to a replica of the Grand Canal, watching fake gondoliers steer boats that have their own electric motors down a waterway that exists entirely inside a (man-made) building. I had lunch with a friend of mine yesterday and the hostess asked us if we wanted to sit “outside,” meaning at a table under a 50-foot painted sky with a view of the fake canal.  Talk about the new realities of the digital divide.

So, don’t text me your issues. I don’t really want to know that quickly. Email is good enough for me. And those of you that can text fluently, go with grace.

Group chats take hold in the enterprise

Tired of taking yet another meeting or wasting more time on more conference calls? Maybe it is time you tried group online chat. While far from a new technology, its popularity around the enterprise is finally taking off because it can deliver real bottom-line returns and can be a real productivity boost. Chat is just part of the overall trend towards better real-time communications that began when corporations moved first to voice mail instead of secretaries, then to email, and finally towards Instant Messaging (IM).

In this story for Techweb, I talk more about how chat is taking hold and why enterprise IT managers are attracted to it. The story was picked up for the print Information Week edition as well.

IM Profits for VARs

VARs should learn from their teenaged children and get on board the Instant messaging (IM) train. IM can solve a lot of problems as enterprise IT managers look for ways to clear out spam-filled email boxes, integrate far-flung project teams, and offer more productive uses of their communications infrastructure. With IM, corporate staff can multitask and carry on multiple conversations, find out if someone is available to answer a quick question, and other tasks that are cumbersome to do with emails and phone calls. VARs that aren’t yet facile with IM should get more involved in this technology and understand the numerous integration opportunities that IM offers.

In this month’s story for eWeek, I discuss several important trends in the IM space that VARs can capitalize on.

AOLfree: You’ve Got Problems!

I haven’t run AOL software since about the time in the late 1990s when Marshall Rose and I were writing our book on Internet Messaging together. We wanted to call the book “You’ve Got Mail” but that is a story for another day. So when AOL announced last week that they were migrating to a free service for those of us that didn’t need their dialup connections any more (dialup? Who uses dialup?) I had to try it out.

Boy, did I enter the wayback machine, Mr. Peabody. Before I knew what was going on, my hard disk had filled up with AOL bloatware. I count the following programs now installed care of Time Warner:

AOL Coach, AOL Connection Services, AOL Deskbar, AOL Spyware Protector, AOL IE Toolbar, AOL You’ve Got Pictures screensaver, Real’s Player, QuickTime, and AOL Computer Check Up. Not to mention the AOL Uninstaller, which only uninstalls one of the above programs. As my friend Barry Gerber would say, who designed this crap?

The AOLfree version faithfully replicates the AOL paid experience: you have AOL IM, a browser to AOL’s portal (when was the last time you needed to check that page?), and of course, AOL email (if you can find a series of characters and numbers that no one else has already grabbed). But why would anyone want to do this? The days of a “walled garden” — as AOL once called its portal — are long over, and most people use whatever email and browser they want these days.

However, there are a couple of things that it doesn’t do, things that parents should know. One of the most useful things of a real AOL account was the ability to set children’s access to content and how they would use their IM and email accounts. While most teens these days know more than parents and how to get around these blocks, the pre-teen set can benefit from these controls. The AOLfree universe is completely free of parental controls.

But if you are still using AOL and don’t have youngsters around, you want to get off the AOL bus now. This is why their phone lines are being clogged with users who want out of their monthly AOL tax on their Internet access. BTW, the number to call is 1-888-265-8008 and operators are standing by 24/7. I will save you the trouble of looking it up on AOL.com, which isn’t the easiest thing to find. And don’t get me started on how much of a maze AOLhelp online is. There are so many blind alleys on their Web site that any noob trying to figure this out isn’t going to get very far. Clearly, they are working on their site. (When I went under AOLhelp, account questions, price plans AOL offers; I got “We’re sorry, currently there are no available documents for this section.” Oops.)

Yes, there are some semi-useful tools, such as AOL Computer Check Up, which scans and attempts to fix your hard disk for things that are wrong with it, but there are better programs around for free, including PCPitStop.com from my friend Dave Methvin. And there is its Spyware blocker, but after installing all these other AOL thingies I am not sure that I can find the blocker among all my desktop clutter anymore. And why, pray tell, do I need both Real and QuickTime players on my machine? Certainly, one would be enough to play all that video content that AOL now is streaming at me, including the intro video with the cute blonde showing me what the software does, which is almost worth the entire hassle of installing and uninstalling AOLfree.

No, this is one piece of freeware that you get exactly what you pay for: a mish-mash of second-rate software, all so that you can have a “vanity” AOL email address to indicate to the rest of the world that you continue to be a clueless noob. Glenn Fleishman writes equally harsh language in this week’s Tidbits.com newsletter:

AOL’s software still stinks. AOL’s email filtering is highly erratic. Any of us who run mailing lists are familiar with suddenly having all of our double opt-in, fully approved AOL users bounce our email for some obscure reason that’s impossible to address directly with AOL.

AOLfree is just another in piece of their software that continues to annoy me. I wrote a short review of their latest AIM Pro IM client for Computerworld that you can read here.

When I wrote that piece I got a few emails from people within AOL that wanted to talk to me. They didn’t provide phone numbers, and I assumed they were product managers so I emailed them back, saying I welcome a dialog. Never heard another peep out of them. Perhaps they didn’t receive my message — but this is just another indication of how hard it is to deal with the company. I think we can say that the merger with Time Warner has been successful at reverse cherry-picking the aspects of two dysfunctional corporate cultures and creating a worst-of-breed new media company.

AOL has done a terrific job of getting noobs on the Net, and providing an IM service for teens that is now being used by many businesses. But their software efforts suffer from coming from a large corporation that has lost its will to be an innovator. There isn’t any reason to use AOLfree. If you still have AOL.com as your domain, it is time to consider other alternatives, like Google, Earthlink, and hundreds of other places that will do a better job.

How to build your own corporate IM system

Corporate IT managers who haven’t gotten on board with instant messaging need to start paying attention and evaluating how they will design their own IM systems. Before you dive into the world of IM, there are three basic strategies you will want to consider:

First, deploying one of the various IM blocking and monitoring products to prevent any unauthorized public IM use. Second, using software from Microsoft Corp. or IBM’s Lotus, the major private IM system vendors. Finally, building your own IM system using a variety of open sources.
These three strategies aren’t mutually exclusive, so you might want to mix and match.

You can read the article in Computerworld here.

AIM Pro — Still in the amateur leagues

Last week AOL released a new business-oriented IM client called AIM Pro. (You can download it for free from www.aim.com.) The client offers some interesting features, however, it is only available for Windows. While it is nice to see AOL thinking about business IM use, AIM Pro doesn’t come close to delivering a competitive offering that Microsoft and Lotus have with their private IM networks and LCS and Sametime clients.

You can read my review in Computerworld here.

How Instant Messaging Is Transforming the Enterprise Network

I continue to publish articles about the intersection of IM and corporate networks. The latest piece appears this month in Cisco’s Internet Protocol Journal and discusses the evolution of IM from the protocol perspective. I compare the largest public IM operators with the XMPP approaches, and talk about how the various pieces fit together and what protocols they use to communicate.

The Changing face of IM in the Enterprise

IM has come of age in the past few years. No longer just the province of chatty teens, it is now part and parcel to many corporations’ advanced communications networks. And as IM takes hold across the enterprise, companies are finding new productivity gains and improvements in customer response time as benefits.

Now, the generation of office workers that grew up with IM has gained control. IM has become the new black, the latest trend to take over IT. And in the process, IM is remaking how the corporate world converses and serving as the basis for a new series of communication applications.

I look at the reasons for IM’s popularity and its future in the enterprise, along with some examples of what people are using it for besides text chats.

You can read the entire New York Times article if you are registered here. I’ll be writing a lot more about IM in the coming months, including another piece for the Times about mobile Skype products.