Like it or not, instant messaging in the enterprise is here to stay. But rather than being on the back foot, it's time for all corporations, both big and small, to come forth and embrace this technology. Similar to how you look at half a glass of water—half-empty or half-full—Instant Messaging, or IM for short, can be perceived to have a positive or negative impact on productivity depending on the way you look at it. When you wake up to the importance of IM, you'll notice that, if properly managed, IM can increase connectivity within the realm of your business and have a positive impact on productivity.
This book is about managing and fostering IM as a real-time collaboration and communication tool. It's not about the 'why', although why IM is important, but rather it is about the 'what' and 'how'—what IM offers and how you can use it to your advantage.
Most people who use the Internet have been exposed to IM. Like email, IM is a user-centric technology. It offers something you want to use by addressing a basic human need—the need to communicate. There are dozens of public IM services: companies ranging from the leading software developer, Microsoft, to the leading web application developers, Yahoo and Google, offer free IM services. To make sure you use them, they also develop IM clients that work across platforms—from Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOSX, and Linux, to handheld devices like your mobile phone and PDA.
While you may be using IM to discuss weekend plans to pick up your aunt from across town, or kill time discussing the latest movie with a bunch of friends, IM also holds the potential to eliminate conversation blues in your workplace. Ever thought your boss was inaccessible? Wondered how to communicate your ideas to all of the members of your team without wasting time organizing a group meeting? IM is the key to all of these problems. In this chapter, we will discuss:
The problems with using IM in an enterprise
The advantages of IM over email and telephone
The benefits of hosting your own Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) server instead of using one of the free public ones
Some of the features to look for in a EIM solution
Openfire's features
Now that companies are beginning to acknowledge the issue of employees using IM during company hours, they face a difficult choice. Blocking IM also stops employees from using it as a means to communicate with clients or other employees. Thankfully, several organizations aren't opting for this "easy" way out. In my personal experience, more and more companies are trying not to curb the proliferation of IM, but are rather taking steps to manage its use—looking for ways to oversee and control IM.
Let's take a short history lesson so that you will know how it all began and will be able to get things in perspective. When enterprises woke up to the benefits of IM, they also felt the need to control its use, and they ran into a void. IM was a public service. There wasn't any business-grade IM software that would provide the security and legal compliance expected from enterprise software. This void was filled in 1998, when IBM launched the first "Enterprise Instant Messaging" (EIM) software, called IBM Lotus Sametime. Microsoft quickly followed suit, first in haste with Microsoft Exchange Instant Messaging, and more properly later with Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.
Today, EIM is a multi-billion dollar business.
Now that companies are beginning to acknowledge the issue of employees using IM during company hours, they face a difficult choice. Blocking IM also stops employees from using it as a means to communicate with clients or other employees. Thankfully, several organizations aren't opting for this "easy" way out. In my personal experience, more and more companies are trying not to curb the proliferation of IM, but are rather taking steps to manage its use—looking for ways to oversee and control IM.
Let's take a short history lesson so that you will know how it all began and will be able to get things in perspective. When enterprises woke up to the benefits of IM, they also felt the need to control its use, and they ran into a void. IM was a public service. There wasn't any business-grade IM software that would provide the security and legal compliance expected from enterprise software. This void was filled in 1998, when IBM launched the first "Enterprise Instant Messaging" (EIM) software, called IBM Lotus Sametime. Microsoft quickly followed suit, first in haste with Microsoft Exchange Instant Messaging, and more properly later with Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.
Today, EIM is a multi-billion dollar business.
Like any Internet user I use IM daily. Like most, I use it to stay in touch with my friends, but every day for the past four years I've also been using IM to communicate with my editors over at Linux.com. Even this book was vetted out with Packt editors over IM.
While you might be impressed by the IDC figures and how IM works for "me", neither means anything if IM doesn't work for "you". IM is about communication—instant, real-time, communication. But of course, IM isn't the only real-time collaboration tool available. In addition to the telephone, the other digital communication tool you have access to is email.
I will not start a flame war here on which tool is the best, but rather will tell you how it ends. When the dust settles on the 'IM versus email versus telephone' battle and the purists retreat, there is only one option—to use all three tools together. Despite the fact that each tool has advantages over the other, because this book is about IM, let me just tell you what IM can do for you that email and telephone can't; at least not with the same efficiency as IM:
IM is the coyote of communication: There's no faster means of communication than IM. It's called "instant messaging" for a reason. Your messages are delivered instantaneously. Also bear in mind that an IM can carry pictures, documents, or anything else that you could have attached to an email, with the same ease as a plain text message.
True interactivity with typing notifications: With IM, you don't have to wait for your email to be read and replied to. As a journalist for Linux.com, speed is very important to me. When working on a breaking news story, neither my editors nor myself can afford to bounce emails to each other, sorting clarifications or edits. Also, IM guarantees that your message has been read and will be replied to. Emails do not come with such a guarantee. No other form of digital communication offers the chance to communicate in real-time. You can mark emails as important, and flag them for a response, but if you need prompt action, there's no faster or more reliable way of communicating than with an IM.
Less chance of misunderstanding: Because IM conversations are instantaneous, the chance of being misunderstood is pretty low. With emails, misunderstandings can linger for a while—at least until someone gets a chance to explain. Because IM follows the natural flow of a conversation, misunderstandings are quickly cleared up.
Better for brainstorming ideas: Because physical team meetings don't happen at the drop of a hat, managers often resort to email for their brainstorming sessions. But such emails suffer from a severe infection which is the biggest known reason for reduced productivity—CC'itis. Also, long threads of email, with multiple recipients, are difficult to follow and manage.
A true extension to your phone book: Email has an address book that lets you manage your contacts, but an IM contact list goes a step further by binding your list of contacts with the power of presence. IM uses a technology called "presence awareness" to detect who is online, so that can see at a glance whether the people with whom you want to communicate are online. Now, can your phone do that?
Knock-knock notification: IM's biggest benefit that'll affect you more than any other feature is its unobtrusiveness. What helps you stay on top of things is a little feature called notifications. These are alerts that let you know when a contact wants to communicate with you, and notify you when someone you'd like to chat with comes online.
Cheap: Several of the features mentioned above can be accomplished, to some degree, with a telephone. The telephone offers true interactivity, and is ideal for group meetings. But you surely run the risk of catching someone at a "bad time" or of using an outdated contact list. The biggest concern for most companies, however, is cost. If I were using traditional methods of communication, I'd be bankrupt—there are several thousand miles and a couple of time zones between me and my editors in the UK and US. IM helps in keeping your communication—costs down, irrespective of whether you work in a one-office home-office setup, or a multinational corporation.
As I mentioned previously, the only way enterprises could safely allow IM proliferation was if they could apply necessary control. Some companies decided to apply "soft" control over public IM, by restricting, limiting, and pre-screening access. Others opted for more concrete steps, looking for a greater degree of control and, more importantly, privacy. These were the first users of EIMs.
By bringing the EIM infrastructure in-house, with an EIM server, a business can truly manage IM sessions, completely eradicating concerns about security and privacy. As with any good server application, an EIM system is also designed to function like any other enterprise application, offering centralized management, and directory and user integration with corporate directory systems such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
Because an in-house EIM server is tailor-tweaked to fit an organization, it does offer some level of customization not found with public IM. This allows a business to integrate IM and its features with other enterprise applications, like corporate email, intranet portals, ERP, and Supply Chain Management solutions and services such as over-the-network telephony.
There's no denying the advantage of an in-house EIM solution, if you want to effectively deploy, regulate, and be in charge of this new and useful means of communication.
There's no dearth of IM systems available. As we'd like to keep things under control and have decided to roll our own IM service, the next obvious question is: what features should we look for in an EIM solution? Not all products are the same, but like email, there are some features common to all and without which you wouldn't call them an IM system.
In this section, we're not discussing those features that are common and obvious; we're identifying the features that separate a good IM solution from an average one. Understanding these features will help us select an ideal, cost-effective solution that not only delivers now, but also grows as the company around it grows:
Authentication: Checking the credentials of the users is the foremost task of a server of any kind. A good IM server should make the task of managing users fairly simple. Rather than insisting on managing users themselves, an IM server should be capable of interfacing with third-party authentication systems, such as Directory Server. This also keeps things simple for your employees who won't have to maintain more than one username and password to access multiple services.
Security: Like all systems in the enterprise, ensuring security is a prime concern. In the case of IM, security becomes all the more important because of the nature of communication. You need an IM system that takes security for messages pretty seriously as they fly across the network,. Some commonly-used security features include secure sign-on, digital signatures, and good ol' encryption.
Protection against infection: This feature of an IM system flows from another feature—interoperability. Because a good IM system wouldn't discriminate against users of a particular operating system, it has to make sure it doesn't transmit virus-infected files between users. Having your IM system use a third-party anti-virus product for scanning files before transmission is a good idea.
Logging: Regulations in some sectors mandate keeping logs of all communication, including IM. Even if it doesn't, monitoring conversations or keeping logs isn't a bad idea. Not only does logging prevent users from misusing the system but some IM systems also have features such as on-the-fly keyword flagging that will alert the appropriate person in case of misuse. If you are required to keep logs, then make sure that the system keeps them in a format that's easily accessible.
Extensibility: The features I've listed above are more or less what you need an IM system to have. Some products are more feature-rich than others. You need a system that offers you the basic set of features needed to get started and then offers exotic ones as extensions or plugins. If you use other services, you should also look for a system that plugs into those services if applicable.
Administration: Adding an IM server to the mix of existing network services increases the administration load. You have to make sure that the IM system doesn't get in your way too much, is easy to manage, and can run on its own, once it's configured and operational.
Not too demanding system requirements: Finally, you have to weigh in what the IM system brings to the table versus what it requires from you. Like most server software, an IM server in itself doesn't require much. But as the number of users using the service increase, the service exerts more pressure on the physical hardware supporting it. Additionally, IM is an always-on service; therefore, you are looking at a machine that can handle the load of possibly hundreds of simultaneous users generating megabytes of logs.
It's been a long time since the days when IBM and Microsoft dominated the EIM market. Now, there are a range of EIM platforms in addition to IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server. Some of the most popular ones are ejabberd, jabberd2, Tigase, and Jabber XCP. According to Wikipedia, there are about 90 million users using Jabber-based servers. Openfire is one such server.
Note: The protocol on which Openfire is based on is now formally called XMPP or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. It was formally known as Jabber, but some people confuse this with the company of the same name (Jabber Inc.). In this book, both terms are used interchangeably to refer to the protocol.
But what's so special about Openfire? There are many Jabber-based EIM servers available on the market. Openfire, which is written in Java, implements most features of XMP, according to Jabber's own website. As a product, Openfire is cross-platform, and is also very easy to setup and administer.
Openfire has lots of features designed to streamline communication within an enterprise. Some of Openfire's features, such as its secure design, are due to its well respected Jabber protocol. Jabber uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) by default, and will establish a secure connection if one is available. Openfire can be configured to allow only secured connections.
While the basic version of the server is available free of cost, an enterprise version, which can be bought for a fee, has features suitable for a large multi-office corporation. Openfire will suit a wide range of enterprises, from home office set-ups to large multi-site enterprises, as it is dual-licensed under GPL along with a commercial extension.
As we'll see in the course of this book, the free GPL'd version is no dumb cousin and has a variety of features that you'd need in an IM server, such as centralized administration of user lists, the ability to broadcast messages to entire groups, and customizable presence states, and tops it all off with a secure feature-rich client. Openfire is designed to complement other existing services running on your network. So, for example, it can plug into a directory server for authenticating users, or into an Asterisk setup for telephony.
Here's a list of some of Openfire's features:
1. Standards compliant.
2. Easy to install.
3. Works with multiple external databases in addition to a built-in one: Openfire can work with several databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQLServer, and IBM DB2. Its own embedded database is powered by HSQLDB.
4. Can interface with OpenLDAP or Active Directory.
5. Cross-linked, easy to navigate web-based front-end: Irrespective of what setting you are trying to tweak, the interface provides you with lots of information and offers you various options to choose from. For example, if you want to change how Openfire handles offline messages, the server offers you various permutations to store, bounce, or drop messages. The interface is also cross-linked, which allows you quicker access to relevant portions of the configuration. For example, in the "Server Information" section, along with a list of ports in use, Openfire has a link to the "Security Settings" section from where you can edit the security settings of the ports.
6. Easy to create and manage user groups: These user groups can be shared to easily pre-populate new users' contact lists with the right people.
7. Custom audit policy: Openfire can audit IM traffic on the server and save the data to XML files. Audit policy settings allow control over how auditing occurs.
8. Group chat and room administration: You can easily create and manage chat rooms. Options allow control over room moderation, maximum occupancy, presence information, and more. The group chat room summary page allows you to view and edit current chat rooms and create new ones.
9. Act as a gateway to other public networks: Gateway settings allow you to authorize individual client applications so that only clients that have been audited for proper security are allowed on your network.
10. Lots of security options: Security settings allow you to control who your users can and can't talk to. Client control allows you to determine which features are enabled in users' IM clients, such as enabling file transfer, message broadcasting, or group chat.
11. Has a secure client: The developers of Openfire also make available a free and open-source client called Spark. Spark is written in Java and is designed to make full use of Openfire's security features.
12. Extend with plugins: A host of plugins are available for functionality such as importing and exporting data and exposing presence data as a web service. Plugins can be fully administered from inside the Openfire administration console. Even the Spark client can learn new tricks with plugins.
13. Advanced Reporting tools: Openfire has advanced reporting tools, which include statistics on active users, conversations, group chat rooms, packet counts and more. With the enterprise edition, you can generate reports for preset time frames or enter specific dates to narrow results. Openfire reports can also be exported as a PDF file.
14. Client control: Openfire Enterprise lets you control the features that are enabled in users' IM clients (for Spark and other clients), such as enabling file transfer, message broadcasting, or group chat. You can also control the version of Spark deployed by users from inside the administration console.
15. Distribute Loads: When deployed in a large enterprise, Openfire has a couple of tricks up its sleeve to distribute and manage loads with other Openfire servers.
16. Run an online helpdesk: With Openfire's Fastpath service you can establish a communication link with users outside your network. This can be used for something as simple as communicating with visitors to your website or as comprehensive as an online helpdesk.
This is just a brief round-up of Openfire's features to get you excited about the book. Again the book is not written to show off Openfire. Instead it's designed to help you setup a usable instant messaging workhorse of a server to kick out any communication blues and enhance the productivity of anyone using the system.
There's no denying the importance of instant messaging in the modern office. The question in front of the management is not whether to use IM or to block it, but rather how to control it. In this chapter, we've looked at some of the benefits of using IM over "traditional" communication methods such as the telephone and email. We've also discussed the benefits of hosting our own EIM server instead of using one of the free public ones.
After analyzing some of the features to look for in a EIM solution, we've decided to use the Openfire real-time collaboration server. The server is dual-licensed under the open source GPL and a commercial license. It supports instant messaging, group chat and VoIP and uses the only widely adopted open protocol for RTC, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance.
In subsequent chapters of this book, we'll setup Openfire, tweak it, and customize it until we have a more secure and feature-rich alternative to other consumer IM networks.
