December 20th, 2006
Exploding Access Points
This week I’ve been thinking about the last year in our industry and the changes that we’ve seen and what really stood out for me is the number of different ways there now is to connect with people over IM.
In the early days of instant messaging networks it was quite easy to define the different types of systems and ways of accessing them. The two key ways used to be:
- Public: Systems run by large service companies such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL, connected to via their own client.
- Enterprise: Private systems deployed behind the firewall such as Microsoft Live Communications Server, IBM Lotus Sametime and Jabber
I started to make a rough list of the ways you can now connect:
- Enterprise - LCS/Sametime
- Enterprise with public federation
- Public - MSN, Yahoo, AIM, AIMPro, ICQ, Google Talk, Skype, etc
- Public with federation - MSN to Yahoo!, Google to AIM
- Web Messenger - As provided by public networks
- 3rd Party Web Messenger - Meebo.com etc
- Web Messenger toolkits - Embed it into any site
- Mobile Native Client - MSN etc on Windows Mobile
- Mobile Web Messenger - in mobile browser
- Mobile Enterprise - Like LCS client on Blackberry
- IM over SMS
I know some of these have been around more than a year and I’m sure I’ve missed some off but it really is an impressive list. The challenge that we’re facing right now is how we manage users across the different access modes rather than just shut them down and loose the productivity gains. A challenge for sure!