I see the fraud is back

M

Just a reminder folks....from the real Quiddy

quidnunc - 26 Mar'03 - 07:37 - 33441 of 33455


Good god! some sensible debate. Wonders will never cease.
I have to confess that i've always found ravey more of an irritant than ainsoph.
Its like having a parrot screaming in your ear all the time.
At least ainsoph always got a view on the action.

Quiddy
(the real one and not the oily incarnation on moanyam)

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2132481,00.html

Start-up bridges instant messaging gap
08:57 Wednesday 26th March 2003
Jim Hu, CNET News.com


New software allows users to communicate with Microsoft and AOL's rival messaging services
Start-up Endeavors Technology said it has found a way to bridge the chasm separating popular instant messaging by America Online and Microsoft.

The upstart on Tuesday unveiled software that it claims will allow AOL Instant Messenger users to communicate with MSN Messenger users. Although the two Internet giants have waged battles when one attempted to interoperate with the other, Endeavors Technology believes its workaround will let AOL and MSN users communicate without violating their proprietary networks.

The software, called Magi Secure XIM, works alongside the AOL and MSN tools and creates a communication bridge between the two services. But instead of letting an AOL user directly exchange messages with an MSN user, the software creates a peer-to-peer connection with another person who has downloaded the IM clients and Magi.

Magi, similar to popular IM management software Trillian, does not create a direct connection between AOL and MSN servers. Rather, the software allows a person to integrate both so-called buddy lists onto one interface and send messages to anyone regardless of the system used.

"You can go from desktop to desktop, and you don't have to go through an AOL server," said Kapi Attawar, vice president of marketing at Endeavors.

This may be an important distinction. AOL, the largest instant messaging service, has long thwarted attempts by competitors, and in particular Microsoft, from tapping into its servers and communicating with its IM users. Server-to-server interoperability has become a controversial topic because rival instant messaging providers want to communicate with AOL's enormous customer base.

Other companies, such as IBM and even Microsoft's server group, have said interoperability will be crucial in IM's adoption as a business communications tool. However, AOL, MSN and Yahoo! have amassed large enough user bases that opening up these networks would not be feasible without a business incentive.

Endeavor Technology considers the launch of its Magi Secure XIM product a solution to the issue of interoperability. The company plans to sell the technology to other companies, bundling the service with security and authentication, but does not have any customers who have implemented the service.

Microsoft and AOL declined to comment on the product.

A Closer Look: IM in Office 2003
March 24, 2003
By Christopher Saunders


Collaboration is shaping up to be name of the game this year for a number of the largest enterprise software vendors.

IBM (Quote, Company Info) Lotus is already embarking on a strategy to share Sametime IM and collaboration services with its other applications; Oracle's (Quote, Company Info) application server group and Sun's (Quote, Company Info) Web portal unit each are gearing up to improve their offerings' collaborative features with greater uses of presence.

Microsoft (Quote, Company Info), meanwhile, is poised to launch an all-out assault with a slew of interrelated productivity and communications products starting around mid-year.

One of the first salvos will come in the form of the latest iteration of Redmond's Office suite of productivity tools. Now rebranded Microsoft Office System, the suite ships with a hefty complement of apps: in addition to the well-known "core" applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and Access, the Beta 2 Kit we reviewed also includes Windows SharePoint Services (and the enterprise-geared SharePoint Portal Server "v2"), FrontPage, Publisher, and OneNote and InfoPath, two additions to the proliferating Office family.

SharePoint points the way

Chief among the suite's new collaborative features is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services -- a product geared entirely toward joint project work.

For those unfamiliar with the offering (previously known as SharePoint Team Services,) the application revolves around user-created sites that serve as repositories for shared team documents and central locations for online projects and chats. These sites can be made open and accessible to users from a particular domain -- enabling colleagues to discover and work with a peer's or another group's SharePoint site.

The new version of Windows SharePoint Services included in Office System 2003 adds presence awareness, based on users' availability on the .NET Service or Exchange Instant Messaging. As a result, colleagues' and partners' statuses are syndicated through SharePoint documents, lists, calendars, discussions, and surveys. Members also can choose to receive notifications via IM (if online) when SharePoint site content changes.

Ideally, this setup eases the task of finding and working with peers and partners. As a result, that's a feature likely to catch the eye of large organizations, who increasingly are looking to better manage their internal knowledge bases by making use of Web portals and integrated IM and presence.

In another major overhaul, users can now create live SharePoint sites directly from within Office applications, working on documents with their colleagues and spawning chat sessions. That's a marked improvement from attempting to work with a colleague using the awkward Online Collaboration command from Office 2000 applications, which relied on the powerful but dated and often-overlooked Windows NetMeeting as its core vehicle for document sharing, and IM and video conferencing. (For one thing, embedded presence in the new setup makes it easier to detect a colleague's availability than had been the case under NetMeeting, which typically required logging into a prearranged ILS server. Its fans will appreciate that the suite still supports NetMeeting collaboration, however.)

The guts of Microsoft Office System

While SharePoint provides site-based collaboration that's tied neatly into Office 2003's core applications -- including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook -- those central apps also benefit from embedded IM and alerting.

The key is having peers' IM handles already registered in users' Outlook Contact Lists and, more than likely, also on the Exchange Server. After that, special fields in Word, Excel, and the like are supposed to reflect colleagues' availability, and each application can spawn instant messaging sessions.

In Word 11, Word documents can recognize and glean presence information for contacts that a user types into a document, with some caveats: the contact must have been e-mailed from Outlook 2003, and must be a .NET Service / Microsoft Passport user. The mechanism for embedded presence is handled throughout much of the Office suite through XML-based "Smart Tags," which show whether contacts are available for chatting on mouseover.

Similar features are supposed to be available in Excel and PowerPoint, but I couldn't get them to function either. Additionally, in Word, I could only get this to work consistently if a contact used their main e-mail address as their .NET Service/Passport ID -- having a main e-mail address that differed from their MSN Messenger username means the two can't be linked (at least in this beta).

Outlook does a better job of leveraging its presence-related improvements. Building on progress made in Office XP, e-mail, meeting views, and the Contact List reflect users' availability -- so if my editor, Kevin, is online, I can right-click on his name to initiate an IM session, or can click to send him an e-mail. Calendars, Tasks and Contact Lists also can be perused and edited by two parties simultaneously.

Despite some problems -- this is a beta release, after all -- Microsoft seems to be making progress in integrating presence into these applications. That's especially the case for enterprises using SharePoint, which makes it very easy for a user to locate an online peer, begin chatting about a current project, and then move into full-fledged document-sharing.

For businesses already doing much of their communications using Microsoft Outlook and MSN Messenger or Exchange Messenger, I expect that the presence-enabled features of Office 2003 will make the often-overused adjective "seamless" actually seem appropriate here: when Smart Tags' contact recognition is working properly, an impressive amount of collaboration can be handled entirely from within a single Office 11 application, obviating the need to use Messenger to repeatedly swap documents with incremental changes.

Microsoft Project receives an overhaul as well. Project Server integrates with SharePoint Services to centrally organize and track Project activity, which in turn ties it back into SharePoint's Document and Meeting Spaces, with their embedded presence.

What's become of the apps I once knew?

Office is one component in Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's big push into collaborative enterprise applications. In addition to groupware-enabling its popular Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools, the software giant also is readying efforts like its "Greenwich" Realtime Collaboration Server, which features IM and can serve as a foundation for other presence-enabled enterprise communications, like videoconferencing.

In many ways, Greenwich represents an overhaul of the concept behind Exchange Instant Messaging with the addition of powerful new communications technologies. The Office System 2003 Beta 2 Kit, on the other hand, suggests that Microsoft's product lineup is maturing by not only introducing important, new components (like the suite's support for XML) but through firming existing products' integration with each other, and with now-ubiquitous services like MSN Messenger / Windows Messenger.

Of course, much remains before Office 2003 ships later this year. Many of the new features in the Office System are controversial (like the suite's support for Microsoft-flavored XML) or, indeed, very much still in flux (for instance, it's not clear whether OneNote and the XML form-creator InfoPath will make it into the final version.) Other features, like presence-detection in the core Office 2003 apps, remains flaky. And some applications, like Publisher, seem to have missed out on IM and SharePoint improvements entirely.

Yet the overall direction that Office is taking by threading collaborative tools throughout the suite suggests that the product's designers are fully appreciative of the potential for workplace IM and presence, and of the ways in which everyday business users might truly begin using groupware -- instead of just ignoring tools like NetMeeting.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.

yes moneylender, I have to agree with you the fraud is back, that is indisputibly not the ains we know and love posting, I was beginning to suspect something. He would never misread a share price as being up not down, he would never imply that the TAD broker forecast of 2004 being a zero dividend and zero EPS growth was good news, this would be mis-representation on a big scale would`t it? , oh no something is fishy in the frog pond,

DAVE

Just a reminder folks....from the real Quiddy

quidnunc - 26 Mar'03 - 07:37 - 33441 of 33455


Good god! some sensible debate. Wonders will never cease.
I have to confess that i've always found ravey more of an irritant than ainsoph.
Its like having a parrot screaming in your ear all the time.
At least ainsoph always got a view on the action.

Quiddy
(the real one and not the oily incarnation on moanyam)

ARE YOU MONEYLENDER2. i WONDER?

Endeavors Links AIM, MSN
March 26, 2003
By Christopher Saunders


Endeavors Technology this week took the wraps off its first-stage implementation of secure, cross-network public instant messaging.

The product, dubbed Magi Secure XIM, acts as a desktop-based proxy that controls outbound and incoming IM traffic. This week, the product gained the ability to link AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger (AKA .NET Service) traffic. Benefits to the end-user include being able to retain a client with which they're familiar, and retain their existing Buddy Lists while using encrypted IM.

Businesses, meanwhile, get network-level control over users' Screen Names and the ability to authenticate users against local Lotus Notes or Exchange servers, and are able to police IM access, enforce virus-scanning, and log conversations and chat sessions. Enterprises also can assign namespace identification to users' IM handles (albeit namespaces not sanctioned by America Online or MSN, which offer their own namespace controls.)

"This allows users to keep the same client, gives IT control of instant messaging, and corporations full control of the directory," said Endeavors' vice president of marketing, Kapi Attawar. "Companies who can't afford to afford to buy a fully compliant IM solution will probably have to interface with many different companies with many different religions of IM. As a result, you build up a Buddy List on your IM client and you get asked to change the client, you now have to figure out how to migrate all of those."

The interoperability is handled through the Magi desktop proxy and a centrally administered DNS server. The setup maps incoming or outgoing AIM or MSN usernames -- for instance, in updates about Buddies' presence, or to start an IM session -- to a format that's appropriate to whichever client is installed locally. To the end user, this activity is invisible.

"We control all the network content and traffic coming into and out of the client, so we can dynamically substitute any content that we want," said Endeavors Chief Technology Officer Greg Bolcer.

Irving, Calif.-based Endeavors has offered non-interoperable secure instant messaging since last year as part of its Magi Secure IM products. Within coming months, the firm plans to add Yahoo! (Quote, Company Info) interoperability to its Secure XIM offering. Closer to the end of the year, we should also see compatibility with IBM (Quote, Company Info) Lotus Sametime usernames.

Already, Attawar said the company has several pilot programs in place, and is lining up partners to promote the technology to new clients.

But one hurdle could emerge in that some companies don't like having locally installed proxies -- preferring instead to oversee traffic at the network proxy level, which makes deployment easier and gives sysadmins peace of mind that desktop users can't override settings. To help combat that, Magi Secure XIM offers notifications to IT staffs that users have disabled their desktop proxy.

The company also said that it expects to not step on any toes with its product. That became an issue with other interoperability players like Cerulean Studios' Trillian, which has periodically lost connections to AIM OSCAR and Yahoo!, as those networks retaliate for unauthorized access.

"We've bent over backwards to make sure we're end-user-agreement compliant," Bolcer said. "We're not changing the client or the service."

Added Attawar, "We're not trying to disintermediate either Microsoft or AOL or the other guys. We're using their directories, their presence, and their client, and with those clients comes the ads and everything else that people are used to ... we still send presence information between the translated services."

At any rate, client-to-client interoperability like that offered by Endeavors sidesteps the prickly issues surrounding server-to-server compatibility in the public IM space. While enterprise offerings like Lotus Sametime and Microsoft's upcoming Greenwich technology support server interoperability based on Session Initiation Protocol, the main public networks have thus far resisted calls to open their servers to the outside.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.

cool quotes.......


Already, Attawar said the company has several pilot programs in place, and is lining up partners to promote the technology to new clients.




"We've bent over backwards to make sure we're end-user-agreement compliant," Bolcer said. "We're not changing the client or the service."

M

some soundbites for those taht are interested


"making IM talk is a serious bussiness"- cnet comment

"bridge the world of instant messaging" Kapi attawar

"tested with 100s of users"- kapi attawar, wonder were they got all those users -)

"Im embedded into bussiness made the eyes light up of attendees at Sunguard"- Kapi attawar

I see there are two tadpole threads, which is the official one?

Ian2

both are, one is a trading thread, this is more a news thread.

Ainsoph posts on both I post on both.

Information is King. see you at the AGM.

M

thanks

From Shares Mag


Chief executive of 'punters favourite' resigns

Shares in punters favourite Tadpole Technology were rejuvenated by the resignation of long serving chief exec Bernard Hulme this week. The shares rose 13% to 5.6p, indicating the decline in Hulmes standing in the city.
David Lee, the non exec chairman appointed by Hulme five years ago is taking over the reins as exec chairman. Hulme has agreed to be a consultant for the next 6 months.
The company recorded a record deficit of 11 million last year. It sold the declining hardware division at christmas, while the enterprise software side has increased sales to 1.8 million but is still unprofitable.
Hulme never quite convinced institutions that he was tough enough to turn around this stricken company. Though he bought 647,000 shares they were purchased at prices much higher than the current level and his options at a strike price of 10p are also under water. Whether Tadpole will ever return to profit remains a moot point.
The shares are for gamblers only.


M

problem with outfits like shares magazine is that i am ure they have no idea at all what TAD really does, christ knows it is diffcult enough for us to have an understanding

how on earth they can focus on last years sales but no qualify them with the profitability of cartesia and the other developments post year end is beyond me

they should either write a full and balanced argument and discussion of not at all

Most of the casual coverage gets it wrong ..... unfortunately ..... but guess they don't really have the time


ains

you mean shares mag with its huge circulation doesn't have hundreds of well informed knowledge writers who are well briefed in all areas writing for it but goes for the easy soundbite?

perish the thought

I used to subscribe to Shares Magazine but became fed up with their shallow and less than reliable analysis - so I cancelled.

I see from the above that nothing has changed !.

:-)) ...... I think you get the idea dick ..... are you going on Monday - should be an interesting afternoon



ains

ainsoph

i am in town but shares in a nominee account so too lazy/working/can't be bothered etc

sure it will all be written up on the boards although i know that is no excuse

i think it will be interesting but all they have to say is "its on course" i.e. profitability in 12 months that is all they need and even if another few mm GEM needed no problem

if anyone is going to ask questions i would like to know about Leica and how much Webex and Autodesk generate and what happened to healthcare wins

but i assume they will be said anyway....

;-)