Redlands Daily Facts - Business

Redlands Daily Facts - Business: "Smart new products prove instant messaging is a killer app" is a report from the DEMO conference, commenting how many applications now inclkude some form of presence display. I have seen this in the latest version of Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, where, for example, on a project web page, all the team members are listed, showing their online status (through MSN). It is very slick, and very useful. Hotmail already has this feature, and open source message boards have had it for a long time.

One quote:

``Every major software company knows they need to integrate presence and IM into their applications,'' said Jon Sakoda of IMLogic, a company featured at DEMO.

Don't know about that....

It's easy enough to do, there are libraries out there (or you can hack out the code from phorum or phpBB or another BB) and hack in your own solution. On a side note, this could be a drawback for alot of the niche players, such as Groupwise's IM, Facetime, or another third-party, proprietary solution, as no doubt they will struggle to keep up with these kinds of innovations.