Microsoft's Greenwich Nears Beta

Solution providers that will test the project have been told to expect CDs within a week to 10 days, sources said.

A Microsoft spokeswoman would not comment on Greenwich's beta status.

As its name states, this technology will be the basis for realtime communications such as secure instant messaging and is slated to become part of Windows 2003 Server. That major operating system is now expected to ship to manufacturing March 12 , a slight slip from the Feb. 28 RTM Microsoft had expected until last week. (See story). But that slight delay should not impact planned general availability in April and the official April 24 Windows 2003 launch, sources said.

Last October, Microsoft executives said the RTC foundation would be part of Windows 2003 but not ship with it initially. Instead, it would be rolled into the operating system within months of its release. They also said the technology would hit beta in the first quarter of this year.

At that time, Harley Sitner, lead product manager for Enterprise Communications at Microsoft, said the RTC capabilities, which at one point were to be part and parcel of Microsoft Exchange Server, represent "a holistic view of realtime collaboration" and provide the basic foundation to make realtime communications ,such as instant messaging, secure and suitable for enterprise use.

Instant communication, pioneered on the consumer side by America Online and Yahoo, has become critical inside the firewall as well. But those consumer offerings are not secure enough to be palatable to most IT departments. AOL launched its own enterprise version of AOL Instant Messenger late last year.

The corporate instant messaging pioneer, however, is IBM/Lotus, which launched Sametime instant messaging four years ago. That product pairs the easy and familiar user interface of instant messaging with the security needed for corporate use.

Since that time, a flock of third parties including IMLogic, FaceTime and others have come up with products to make instant messaging more attractive for corporate use. These companies offering archiving and reporting tools that help instant messaging meet muster for new and emerging corporate and even federal mandates. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, for example, requires that publicly held companies track and archive relevant e-mail communications.