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Opinion: Microsoft Hijacks SIP/SIMPLE In LCS 2005
Messaging Pipeline
The need for enterprise-ready IM and presence solutions has gained widespread attention in recent months. Businesses have quickly -- and sometimes, painfully -- realized that consumer applications for IM simply don't cut it in the workplace because they lack the critical security, scalability, and compliance features required for business communications. They also cannot offer the interoperability that has become almost a prerequisite for communicating and collaborating with users both inside and outside an organization.
The plain fact is that internal communications infrastructures have become increasingly complex. Businesses are simultaneously interacting internally and externally with their partners, customers, and suppliers on a more frequent bases due to growth, consolidation, and globalization. And that has created the need for communications environments that can flexibly extend across companies, across locations, and across borders.
IM and presence applications deployed in these environments can only be successful if they can seamlessly federate across different solutions and systems. This need for interoperability has led to the formation of various initiatives within the communications community, with organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working to create standards that will enable corporate networking environments to be compatible with one another.
One of the first such protocols on the scene was the Session Initiation Protocol/SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIP/SIMPLE). And growing in popularity is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), which was recently ratified by the IETF. Neither of these standards has emerged as the clear winner in the protocol race, a fact which has served to reinforce the concept that presence network architectures must remain open, supporting not only different systems but different protocols, in order to prevail.
What does this have to do with LCS 2005? Despite indications that the market is moving towards a cross-system, cross-protocol approach, Microsoft went against that movement with the release of LCS 2005. As with previous versions, LCS 2005 is built on the SIP/SIMPLE platform, and Microsoft has tied its application to a single protocol, and a single protocol only.
To make matters worse, rather than using a pure installation, Microsoft uses proprietary extensions of SIP/SIMPLE as the platform for LCS 2005. They call it a modification, but we call it a hijacking, and it's forcing customers into a closed IT environment.
How is Microsoft hijacking SIP/SIMPLE? Start at the client-to-server side, the protocol exchange between the Windows Messenger or Microsoft Istanbul clients, and an LCS server. The SIP/SIMPLE protocol currently has some limitations when it comes to IM, particularly when it comes to buddy list management, so Microsoft has gone to great lengths to fill in the functionality gaps by implementing their own protocol payload and exchange sequences. While this may fill in the gap left by the fact that SIP/SIMPLE is still being developed, and while it may improve the available feature set, these extensions are Microsoft's intellectual property. That means they must be licensed by any third-party that wants to have access to them in an official manner.
That's not quite in the IETF "standard protocol" spirit, is it? The truth is that Microsoft actually prevents any third-party SIMPLE client to connect to an LCS 2005 server. Doing so would be in breach of Microsoft's licensing of those proprietary payload and protocol extensions.
What is Microsoft's answer to developing and connecting clients for LCS 2005? The RTC Client API, which is an SDK (Software Development Kit) that isolates the underlying SIP protocol stack by forcing development and connectivity through a higher-level approach that does not allow any meddling with protocol payloads. Microsoft's agenda is clear: implement proprietary extensions, and prevent people from circumventing their SDK framework.
There is a similar effect on the protocol exchange between servers. LCS 2005's sequence of SIMPLE dialogues will not work directly with other SIMPLE implementations, such as those from Lotus/IBM. Support for LCS 2005 from my company through our IM and presence applications, has had to implement a specific version of SIMPLE in order to allow federation with LCS 2005 servers.
With the launch of LCS 2005, it would seem that Microsoft has side-stepped the opportunity to begin a march towards IM federation and instead implemented an agenda of furthering a single-vendor ecosystem. That is an approach that very well may not provide best-of-breed solutions in the IM space. Is this really what's in the best interest of corporate customers in today's market?
Maxime Seguineau is CEO and Chairman of Antepo, Inc., a pioneer and leading vendor of secure, interoperable Enterprise Instant Messaging, Collaboration and Presence systems based on its Open Presence Network (OPN) platform. Antepo is an active member of the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association (FIMA), and includes Merrill Lynch and Sprint among its customers. For more visit www.antepo.com.
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