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R E V I E W

IM Grows Up

June 26, 2003
By Mike DeMaria

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WiredRed Software e/pop Professional 3.0

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	In this article
	Introduction
	More Than Instant E-Mail
	IBM Lotus Instant Messaging 3.0
	WiredRed Software e/pop Professional 3.0
	Sun Microsystems Sun ONE Portal Server: Instant Collaboration Pack 3.0.1
	Other Products Reviewed
	Executive Summary \| Web Links
	Report Card

With its highly customizable client executable, e/pop Professional is the most security-conscious of the products we tested. If only it had some of the feature sophistication of IBM's offering--most notably, chat room, moderation and polling--e/pop might have surpassed the rest.

With e/pop, changed settings are rewritten into the client executable, so there is no config file that someone else could modify. You can disable file transfers, chat rooms, client shutdown, and so forth. You can also put in a server password that won't let anyone connect to your server. This is designed to prevent users from getting around the executable restrictions you set.

Of the products we tested, only e/pop uses the ICQ message interface, which resembles an e-mail thread, rather than AIM's chat-room model for sending messages. Some users will despise you; others will kiss your toes. Within that interface, e/pop lets you perform screen sharing, view a user's processes table, remote reboot and remotely specify a command to run, all with the user's permission.

The e/pop system contains a few unique features, including a built-in spell-checker and thesaurus, and you can set a message to expire after a certain number of minutes or at a specified time.

Although e/pop's polling capability is simple, it's enough for the basics. You can create clickable reply buttons in a message and broadcast that message to multiple users, groups or the entire organization. Unfortunately, you can't specify which groups a user may broadcast to.

Interface

click to enlarge

E/pop provides global lists for administrators and personal contact lists for users. The admin can preset users and groups and allow browsing of the Active Directory tree, as well as create profiles that contain lists of users or groups. We could create multiple profiles, but assigning a profile to a user is a manual process that's not tied into directory groupings.

E/pop's reporting capabilities blow the competition away. You can search and browse any IM or chat conversation. The search option lets you limit results by time, keyword, user, group or IM server. Multiple admins can be created for the reporting component, and these access controls can be set so they are limited to searching their own users or departments. Also included is a content filter. We specified a few keywords of colorful language, and any messages containing those words automatically showed up for administrator review.

e/pop Professional, WiredRed Software, (888) 665-EPOP, (858) 715-0970. www.wiredred.com