Nextplane - another coexistence solution

I just enjoyed a demo from a company called Nextplane who offer OCS and Sametime interconnectivity along with XMPP/Jabber thrown in too... and their interconnectivity model isn't direct connections but through a Federation server. It worked just fine with 1-1 chats and presence and awareness coming back and forth just fine...
They are supposedly going to be working on multi-user chats by leveraging the OCS multi-user functionality (Chat rooms with OCS R2) and having people from remote systems such as Jabber and ST connect in as a 1-1 chat to the chat room. This way they don't have to actually address any of the complicated multi-way chat issues - the multi-way chat engine is simply the OCS R2 engine with some ST and Jabber users connecting up....
If you are in need of such a solution, then let me know and I can set you up.....

Back soon!

OK - so I haven't been blogging the last three weeks as I took a vacation... but I will be back this week with more to say on these matters.....

Sametime and OCS interconnectivity

Well, what do you know? After blogging about the possibility of OCS and ST interconnectivity yesterday, I receive a note today that a hotfix for the Sametime Gateway is available which will allow it to connect up to OCS2007. So, I'm gonna try it out - watch this space for more details.....

Did you know?

That Sametime and Office Communications Server interconnectivity is so very close but as usual separated by two interpretations of a standard?
The SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) is the standard I am referring to. Microsoft have taken SIP, added some extensions and that is what they use server to server, whilst Sametime, having a proprietary protocol internally, has a gateway that talks IETF SIP, i.e. the basic, standards-defined SIP. Which means, in layman's terms, that the two systems cannot talk to one another.... without some kind of SIP router/gateway/translator in between.
The good news is that I have heard it rumoured that IBM/Lotus may be releasing a module for their gateway pretty soon that talks Microsoft SIMPLE and thus interconnectivity would take one step forwards.

Instant Messaging coexistence

Instant Messaging coexistence

There are two enterprise IM players today, Microsoft and IBM/Lotus with the products OCS2007R2 and Sametime V8 respectively. Both of these products have a SIP gateway ability and both these products can be connected up to external public IM gateways. Using this gateway technology with the addition of a SIP router, interconnectivity can be set up to support Presence and Awareness (P&A) between the two enterprise systems with one-to-one instant messaging.

Email coexistence

It's a simple fact that email coexistence is very easy to set up today. If you are a company using more than one email system, you don't have to believe what the vendors tell you and migrate to a single platform.
In fact, this paradigm works not only with email but with Instant Messaging and Enterprise Content Management.
You may consider it the easy option to choose one platform to work with but in some cases this is simply not possible:

• Two companies merge and they want to use the platforms they used up to the merger as they are used to them and that's what makes them work well....
• All your documents are on Enterprise Content Management platform and you simply can't move this stuff...

There are easy ways to solve these problems not in the least running multiple email services within your company.