Skip to main content

IBM Gets Talking to Yahoo & GTalk; Is this Good News for Microsoft ?

IBM Lotus Sametime, the most popular messenger among corporates, can now connect directly with Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and AOL AIM messenger clients.

This means that if you are using IBM messenger inside the Office firewall, you can still chat and exchange files with outside friends and family who are on GTalk, Yahoo or AIM messengers. They neither have to upgrade to Lotus Sametime and nor you have to install another IM client on the Office PC.

Now this could be an interesting deal to watch from the Microsoft perspective for two reasons:

One, Microsoft has always been shy in supporting the XMPP prototocol in MSN Messenger (Windows Live) that could make their software connect with rival offerings from AOL or Google. [Yahoo, an exception here]

Second, Microsoft is the second largest player in the enterprise messaging market (next to IBM) and it will be interesting to see how organizations react to the above news.

Not all of them would be happy to learn that employees can use the messaging system inside the office to pass on confediential data to someone outside the boundary using GTalk or Yahoo.

That could possibly make a winning case for corporates to make the switch from IBM Sametime to Microsoft enterprise IM (aka Microsoft Office Live Communications Server) for "security reasons".

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google