MS TechEd: Live Communications Server 2003

May 28 2004

I captured some of this on Wednesday, and just now am getting around to posting it.  I left the conference yesterday...there's only so much I can take ;)
Anyway, there was a session on Wednesday afternoon about MS Live Communications Server.  I found this session interesting for two reasons:

  • The presenter seemed to take the attitude that business instant messaging is a brand-new idea, something future-oriented.  "The scary thing is that you don't know where it's going to go".  Well, I think IBM Lotus has a pretty good idea, having been in market for six years and lead the market the entire time.
  • The presenter spent several minutes, and several slides, explaining how "strategic" LCS is to Microsoft.  Many of these slides were exactly the same as those I remember from the last Exchange conference (MEC) in October, 2002.  "Only Microsoft can deliver these solutions today and build on them tomorrow."  Uh huh.  In my experience, when a Microsoft presentation has to spend as much time and energy as this one did explaining that the product is "strategic", it's usually another stone in the MS collaboration graveyard within 6-12 months.  Especially since so much of the useful future feature commitments were listed as "Longhorn" era.
Oh, and here's a great sales pitch for LCS's scalability: "It's a lot of servers, but you can do it."

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  MS TechEd 2004  Add/View Comments [10]

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  1. 1  Hans  | 5/29/2004 5:06:53 AM

    10-4 on your comments about LCS2003. What is the parallel or equivalent on the IBM/Lotus side -- especially as it concerns developers writing "SIP driven" apps? Is there a comparison of features discussed anywhere?

  1. 2  David Lai  | 5/29/2004 9:59:04 AM

    I was told by IBM that Sametime isn't used for messaging.ibm.com and that most IBMers prefer Notesbuddy as an IM client. Why not?

    I was also notice that IBM (and Lotus) don't use Sametime for external emeetings or web conferences. Why not?

    I read your Ambuj says "Code Talks". Microsoft use messenger internally very accepably for all internal IM. The also use their own producs for web conferences internally and externally.

    Maybe you should check why before making such bold assertions in blogging page.

  1. 3  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 5/29/2004 10:48:56 AM

    There are tons of external meetings held on ibm.com using Sametime technology -- I'm on an average of one or two a week.

    The messaging.ibm.com deployment is Sametime -- with a different configuration deployed for scalability, but it is still on something like six or eight servers.

    Notesbuddy -- or IBM Community Tools -- are still Sametime. They use the same protocol, infrastructure, buddy lists, and integration. It's just a different client; sort of like Notes vs. Domino Web Access (Or Outlook vs. OWA). And while we're happy to have IBMers choose whatever client they want, the internal deployment of Notesbuddy or ICT is only a small fraction of 320K IBMers -- as if that even matters.

  1. 4  Nathan T. Freeman  | 5/29/2004 11:33:21 AM

    "I was told by IBM that Sametime isn't used for messaging.ibm.com and that most IBMers prefer Notesbuddy as an IM client." Hi David. I was never able to figure this out, but for some reason, it is utterly impossible for anyone at Sony to ever get accurate information about IBM. From product capabilities to internal deployments to licensing to product roadmaps, no one in that company including JP (who ate, slept and breathed Domino) has ever made a statement about IBM within my range of hearing that was accurate. It's bizarre. Even now, the only global application deployed in all of Sony Corporation is on the Domino platform (their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance tracking) and yet they are unwilling to spend money on establishing a support infrastructure and are already planning on migrating to a java-based solution (on Websphere, in this case, which they will be utterly incapable of supporting.) Sony is a case-study in why corporate shareholders should start demanding IT audits that are every bit as diligent as accounting audits.

  1. 5  Oliver Regelmann http://www.n-komm.de/blog.nsf | 5/29/2004 12:10:59 PM

    But I bet within a year everyone in the world will know what LCS is and will want to have it while we'll still see question marks in customer's eyes and "nice toy" notions when telling them about something with the name "IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing".

    That's the difference between MS marketing and IBM marketing.

  1. 6  Alan Lepofsky  | 5/29/2004 12:35:33 PM

    David... From Jan-Aug 2003 (I'll see if I can get a more recent report, but this should give you some idea! I also imagine usage is going up up up!) IBM recorded 105,933 internal webconferences, and 15,224 outbound conferences. That does not include and "rouge" servers that departments may use, testing and demo servers, etc... just the "official IBM infrastructure."

    Have your account rep contact me, I'm happy to point them to this type of information.

  1. 7  Hans  | 5/29/2004 2:57:35 PM

    What is the parallel or equivalent on the IBM/Lotus side -- especially as it concerns developers writing "SIP driven" apps?

    Is there a comparison of features discussed anywhere?

  1. 8  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 5/30/2004 6:15:36 PM

    Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.x is built fully on SIP and SIMPLE. APIs will be provided in 2H04.

    I'm a little worried, Hans, that you're just trying to be acronym compliant. The lab analysis I've seen of MS LCS says that SIP as implemented there has extensions to it that prevent it from being interoperable, say, with the SIP gateway already available for Lotus Sametime. Not sure that just because they've done SIP, you have a better shot of building ISV apps than, say, with the fully documented and widely used APIs for Lotus Sametime.

  1. 9  Carl http://www.instant-tech.com | 5/31/2004 4:12:17 PM

    Well it's interesting to note that at the Sametime/QuickPlace conference last week, IBM stated that you will need a lot more servers to get the same scaling with Lotus Workplace as you have today for Lotus Sametime.

    Most of the existing toolkits will no longer work with the new Workplace IM server, apart from over a SIP bridge which will require a separate Sametime server, and will only provide cross functionality for IM and awareness, no N-Way chat/place based stuff/ audio/video/meetings etc.

    Applications developed with the ST COM/JAVA/C++ toolkits will need to be rebuilt using a SIP/SIMPLE toolkit, not a small amount of work, and very possibly with less functionality because of the maturity of the SIP standard vs the proprietary ST protocol.

    Lotus Workplace is intended to be a SIP/SIMPLE server, Microsoft LCS is that now in version 1.0, IBM/Lotus is now officially playing catchup with Microsoft LCS version 1 regarding server protocols.

    Lotus today has the most broad offering of any of the vendors with the toolkit support for Lotus Sametime, this "broadness" is thining down with Workplace.

    I do personally believe that Microsoft sees IM/Presence/Awareness as more strategic than IBM/Lotus does. Which is a shame as Lotus was here before anyone else, understood it before anyone else and promoted the concept more than anyone else. Microsoft also realises the value of awareness in more than just IM, with a number of telephony partners to date. If the LCS slides were the typical default Microsoft LCS slides, then you'll probably admit their presentation on awareness and what it will offer in the future is fairly compelling stuff and more broad than the latest IBM/Lotus slides in this area.

    The bit about Microsoft presenting as if they are first to do it, is a technique from their presentations101 course, "Don't acknowledge your competition unless you want your customers to evaluate them". I blogged about this a while ago, the most irritating thing to this is that most observers watch it and believe, bbbaaaaahhhh is the noise most of them make.

    So moving from Sametime to LCS involves the following steps:

    1. If you require coexistence during your migration install a 3rd party gateway for IM awareness amd 1-1 chats.

    2. Install more hardware.

    3. Migrate Buddylists to LCS.

    4. Migrate applications to SIP/SIMPLE.

    Perversly, progressing from Sametime to Workplace involves the same steps, except that the gateway will be provided by IBM/Lotus rather than a 3rd party.

    LCS is version 1. To date, they have 0 large scale enterprise deployments, but that is going to change, I personally know of two corporations that are in the process of planning their migration from Sametime to LCS, that will be a loss of about 80,000 users to LCS, a small part of the 10.5 million ST users, but acorns grow into trees. LCS performance is also bad today, and network traffic is heavy, some of that is being addressed in V2, and some of it is an issue with the SIP/SIMPLE protocol and the same issues that Workplace is about to hit.

    Keeping the reporting balanced...even if it's painful.

  1. 10    | 6/1/2004 9:09:17 AM

    10-4 on SIP/SIMPLE compliance and acronyms.

    You just don't see MS at too many SIPop, or other SIP interoperability events. Their base APIs are based on the IETF RFC 2543 -- not the more current RFC 3261. So double whammy, they have extended an old implmentation.