AOL Targets Businesses with AIM Pro
Today AOL launched a new product, AIM Pro, that takes the AIM protocol and merges it with the WebEx business suite. With AIM Pro, AOL is taking advantage of the fact that many businesses use some form of instant messaging to communicate. The new product is advertisement-free, features encrypted conversations as well as Outlook integration and audio/video conferencing capabilities.
I think the strongest draw for companies will be the out of the box integration and encryption. At Yahoo! we all use Y! Instant Messenger (obviously) and I’m a little paranoid at times since it’s unencrypted and traffic is monitored/logged.
Seems pretty cool, the video still doesn’t work well between iChat and AOL Pro, but the audio seems to do good.
I hope that Apple will make iChat encryption a default option with the release of Leopard. From what I can tell, encryption is already built into the AIM protocol, you just have to create a certificate to use.
A professional enterprise version of arguably the worst IM software in existence? Wow, props to AOL for managing that.