IBM expands availability, improves ICT messaging client

By Kate Evans-Correia, Search400.com Senior News Editor 13 Aug 2003 | Search400.com

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IBM has expanded the availability of its IBM Community Tools (ICT), an experimental messaging project that could eventually make its way to market.

ICT is a messaging client, hosted on an iSeries 820, that combines the technologies from WebSphere MQ Event Broker, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging, WebSphere Application Server and DB2. It gives users the ability to broadcast messages to thousands of users instantly to locate experts, start impromptu discussions and survey large groups of people instantly, all in real time.

ICT made its debut to IBM iSeries customers and IBM business partners in February. With this release, the tool becomes available on IBM's AlphaWorks, a Web site for developers.

"This is very much experimental technology," said Stu Feldman, a vice president with IBM's Internet technology group. "By offering these tools to the AlphaWorks community, we get to see how this plays out to different types of users. The idea is to get some rapid feedback from other communities.

"ICT gives users the ability to target communities, instantly broadcast questions, polls, alerts, and ideas to thousands of other online community members and get real-time feedback from peers worldwide, who have agreed to share their skills, knowledge and opinions, which we feel is a really good fit with AlphaWorks users."

Feldman said that, in the next few weeks, ICT will also be rolled out within a university environment. Although Feldman did not give specifics, he said it's a way for IBM to see how a completely different population uses the tools.

This new release has a number of upgrades, fixes and features not available in the first offering.

According to Judy Warren, a senior software engineer with IBM's Internet technologies unit, which developed ICT for internal use, feedback from early users has been reflected in this new set of tools.

"We worked out a number of the bugs, fixed the look and feel and added some new features," she said.

"I'd say they cleaned up 75% of the bugs and added functionality that people really needed that they didn't have before," said John Brandt, a programmer and vice president of technical services with iStudio400.com, a Texas-based consulting firm. Brandt, who said he uses ICT daily to ask questions, answer questions and participate in chats, said this release is a more refined product.

One of the most notable changes is a just-in-time chat feature called FreeJam that's been tweaked to accommodate users who happen into a conversation already in progress.

"One thing people complained about was that if you joined late you didn't know what was said," Warren said. "We added something that saves a FreeJam as long as somebody's still in it. You can scroll so you can see what was said before you joined."

The new release also includes a client that gives users the ability to run IBM Lotus Instant Messaging on a PDA.

"If you wanted to participate in an ICT chat, instead of going home and sending an e-mail, you can ask a question right from your PDA," Warren said.

Despite the tools obvious "coolness" within certain communities, Feldman said that, at this point, IBM is making no commitment to roll this out as a product.

"Certainly, we expect if this is successful it would indicate a possible direction we would take," Feldman said. "However, nothing has been formally decided."

Brandt is much more ready to go out on a limb with his prediction for the ICT's future.

"I'm assuming that the next three to six months will see ... integration with video," Brandt said. "IBM didn't say that, but if I was in charge of it, that's where I'd go."

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