Sun unveils IM software

This week Sun announced its Collaborative Business Platform, which incorporates key collaborative technologies and professional services for Sun’s portal and communications product lines. Sun is aiming the software at enterprises of 10,000 or more users.

This instant messaging offering includes the features you would expect in an enterprise-grade product, including secure end-to-end transmission of instant messaging traffic, auditing and logging of instant messaging conversations, namespace control and authentication through an Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-enabled directory.

Other features include the ability to send alerts to individuals or to multiple recipients; forwarding of these alerts to an e-mail address, an SMS-capable mobile phone or a pager when offline; moderated conference rooms; and integration with the Sun ONE Calendar Server so that notifications about events and other time-sensitive information can be delivered through the instant messaging system.

Sun has also included a message-conversion API to filter for spam and viruses delivered through instant messaging.

The next release of the instant messaging product will enable users to change their status to “invisible,” although they will still be able to see whether others are online. The software will also archive instant messaging conversations and let users conduct instant polls among other instant messaging users.

Sun  prefers to provide interoperability through standards, and plans to support Session Initiation Protocol and SIP for instant messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) in a future release. The company currently has a working prototype of its SIP/SIMPLE-compliant product.

Sun’s instant messaging server is available for Windows, Solaris and Linux. The clients are 100% written in Java, so they can run independently or in a browser. They support Windows, Solaris, Linux and Mac OS. Pricing for Sun’s instant messaging offering starts at $30 per seat and sells for $20 per seat in quantities of 10,000 to 50,000 seats.