Must work together

Brian Park, senior producer at Yahoo! Inc. said his company has seriously considered opening up its protocols over the next six months or so if there is not major movement towards some sort of standard.

However, opening the company's protocols, is "definitely not an ideal situation," Park said, due to concerns about security. What he's hoping for is some sort of work from the major players in the industry towards interoperability at least with each other.

"We're starting to realize that the (work toward creating an official Internet Engineering Task Force) standard is moving along more slowly than we thought," he said.

Something that may push the industry ahead, and may grab the interest of the corporate world, is Microsoft Corp.'s plans to integrate IM into the new version of its Exchange server.

The company plans to release a software developer's kit for instant messaging when it launches Exchange 2000 this summer, said Francis deSouza, product unit manager at Microsoft.

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Outlook 2000 add-on

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