AIM Pro Service Goes Beta

June 15, 2006

By Dan Muse

In February, AOL and WebEx Communications announced plans to develop an enterprise-grade IM, online conferencing, collaboration, desktop sharing and multimedia services.

Yesterday AOL announced the fruits (or near fruits) of that arrangement, saying that the public beta of the Professional Edition of the AIM Pro service is available for the downloading. This edition is aimed at individual business professionals, workgroups and small to mid-size businesses and is scheduled to be available for a monthly fee late this summer.

A beta version of the Enterprise Instant Messaging edition with centralized administrative controls for larger corporations will be available next week, according to an AOL spokeswoman.

The AIM Pro service, Professional Edition comes with an ad-free interface, integration with Microsoft Outlook and one-click access to WebEx Communications voice and video conferencing and desktop-sharing services.

The service is designed to allow at-work users to use their professional e-mail address as their AIM Pro Screen Name, link to existing AIM accounts and migrate existing AIM contacts into the AIM Pro Buddy List feature.

AOL hopes to lure what it says are more than 80 million users on the global AOL instant messaging network, which is made up of AIM, ICQ and Apple iChat with fee-based, business-grade, secure (e.g., SSL encryption) services.

AOL also reports that AIM Pro Service will provide its users with access to more than 75 percent of all enterprise IM users via AOL's AIM Clearinghouse service and federation agreements with Microsoft Live Communications Server and IBM / Lotus Sametime 7.0 as well as EIM systems from Jabber, Antepo, Parlano, Omnipod and Communicator.

AOL said it plans to expand on business-grade tools and security features to including the following:

• Automatic anti-virus file scanning
• Auditing, logging and compliance capabilities
• AIM Phoneline and AIM Phoneline Unlimited integration, which is designed to give users a free, local phone number to receive unlimited incoming calls online through the AIM Pro service. It will also allow users to upgrade to a complete, E911-compliant PC-based phone service with unlimited in- and outbound calling to 30 countries for an additional monthly fee.

Source: http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/3613836