Extract From Byte Magazine - Oct 22 - IBM Community Tools

[Steve Bildermann]

As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

When IBM acquired Lotus it brought several software products on board, among which was an enterprise instant messaging tool called Sametime. Analysts estimate that Sametime controls between 60 75 percent of the enterprise market, with penetration even higher among larger organizations. 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. [continued...]

[Steve Bildermann]

This year, at IBM's annual PartnerWorld conference, iSeries General Manager Al Zollar unveiled IBM Community Tools, an integrated suite of messaging and broadcast messaging tools showing that IBM now seeks to further extend its online community strategy.

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, the ICT have 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.

Just 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 polls in real time and gather feedback from anonymous users within the community. The aim of the suite is to let enterprise users 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 locate specialists, start discussions, and survey large groups instantly, all in real time.

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, and Web services running on WebSphere Application Server, the Apache application server and the DB2 database. An IBM eServer iSeries 820 hosts the ICT applications.

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 (a different target group) take to the tools.

The ICT Broadcast Suite is a collection of five applications:

• 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 products, where if you enter mid discussion, you have no idea what has been said.
• 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.
• SkillTap instantly broadcasts 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 add their session as an FAQ, while the Broadcaster can rate the help they were given.
• 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.
• W3alert sends and receives alert to members, and can include url links to Websites. This is for situations when you want to send out a quick message; for example, to warn users of a potential e mail virus.

There are also three additional mini applications: Alert Manager allows you to set up 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. And 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 Web site has a well designed Flash demo to walk you through the tools and their respective functionality.

Filtering Alerts and Messages

Among the ICT's 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 you 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 to view only the alerts that do not contain any of the words in your list.
• No Filtering has no filtering applied. You get everything!

Thorny Issues

Instant messaging has long been touted as the next "killer app." And like e mail, its Achilles' heel is security. Though ICT offers a powerful platform to communicate in real time with community members, developers have voiced considerable concerns about the security limitations.

John Brandt, Vice President of technical services at iStudio400.com, believes that that security will be 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. In addition, as most businesses are behind firewalls, this will most likely restrict port availability. ICT requires newsgroup and Sametime access TCP ports that are closed in many companies. The issue of ports means that some users can't use ICT at work, which essentially defeats the whole purpose. And System Administrators will be reluctant to open ports in the firewall for ICT because of the security exposure.

ICT does support the SOCKS proxy protocol (version 4 and 5), but many users will not have SOCKS proxies available. Support for HTTP proxies is not yet available. Simply put, in its current incarnation, ICT is not designed for use in a highly secure environment.

WebAhead, a Connecticut based software firm, worked on ICT and are addressing the issues as they are captured. The WebAhead team acknowledges problems besides security, such as ICT's tendency to consume an excessive amount of memory when sitting in an idle state waiting for messages. One ICT user reports that ICT is using 43,156 KB of memory on a 512 MB system; ICQ has a passive footprint of only 5,092 KB. Instability is another issue; the system tends to hang after several hours of using ICT, though recent posts to the ICT newsgroup suggest that this is now remedied.

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 stand alone 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 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 AOL and Microsoft. AOL is preparing corporate versions of its popular Instant Messenger service. As uptake for ISP subscriptions bottoms out, AOL plans 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 entrant Yahoo! has 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. McDonald's, Bayer, and Honeywell (among others) have all signed up for Business Messenger.

In the face of this competition, ICT's file transferring capabilities and video integration may differentiate it from other "plain vanilla" instant messaging tools, as will the suite's support for Linux. The future will be interesting.