It will form the basis of a collaborative infrastructure where users will be able to carry on secure IM and whiteboard sessions, as well as share applications and files in real time, said Vivek Kundra, the county's director of IT.

'The good news is that it is easy to detect the use of services and to either shut them down or to give users an alternative that is a sanctioned enterprise product,' said Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston.Īrlington County, Va., is rolling out Microsoft's Real-Time Communications server software, which will tie into the county's Exchange 2003 and Active Directory environments. AOL Instant Messenger, for instance, is used in 64% of the companies surveyed, Osterman said. The firm's twice-yearly surveys have shown adoption of commercial IM products to be growing faster than consumer IM products on corporate networks, Osterman said.Īt the same time, public IM products still dominate corporate networks. Such concerns are pushing an increasing number of companies to look for new ways to secure IM communications, said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research Inc.

Security analysts for some time have been warning that unchecked use of such software could cause dangerous holes in enterprise firewalls, leading to sensitive corporate data being exposed on public networks and files being transferred in an unprotected fashion. But he claimed that only one of the flaws, involving a feature that lets users open Internet e-mails, is dangerous. A spokesman for AOL's ICQ subsidiary acknowledged the flaws in the latest version of ICQ's freely downloadable chat software.

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