The EFP program launched by AOL aims to achieve enterprise instant messaging interoperability

On Thursday, local time, AOL plans to announce an ongoing plan to enable interoperability between its AIM and ICQ instant messaging services and other manufacturers' enterprise instant messaging (IM) services.
AOL wants
The alliance partner's (EFP) plan allows users of instant messaging systems of different enterprises to add AIM and ICQ users to their IM friends lists. Otherwise, AIM and ICQ users can also add IM users to their friends list to exchange information with each other.
"The biggest feature of the AOL plan is the true interoperability in the enterprise environment," said Michael, an industry analyst at Osterman information. It can be said that interoperability is one of the key growth points of instant messaging in enterprises. With interoperability, there will be no isolated islands in enterprises that cannot communicate with each other. Because AOL's plan targets the integration of a large number of real enterprise-level instant messaging systems, this is undoubtedly a huge step forward for achieving interoperability ."
While implementing the EFP program, AOL also announced four enterprise instant messaging system partners: Antepo, Jabber, Omnipod, and Parlano. However, IBM, an important enterprise instant messaging vendor, did not cooperate with AOL. IBM's Lotus Sametime was a mainstream enterprise instant messaging system and was able to interoperate with AIM several years ago, but since then there will be no interoperability.
Currently, the most common connection method is to connect AIM with the enterprise instant messaging system through third-party gateway software. However, the execution is complicated and sometimes the performance is unstable.
Lei, system architect of Morris Communications, said that this situation was prominent in Morris Communications. The company adopted the Antepo UDF system as the platform of the enterprise's instant messaging system, the gateway software is used to connect the Antepo and the public instant messaging system. However, this method is not ideal. If there is a problem with the IM network, the chunks with the Antepo's OPN are damaged, so we have to re-debug the gateway software.
Instant messaging users are increasingly demanding for interoperability, especially in enterprises. The main reason is that many enterprises urgently need their employees to communicate with customers and partners using public instant messaging networks (such as AIM) through their internal instant messaging systems.
AIM is the largest free public instant messaging network for individuals. AOL estimates that about 14 million users are using AIM. The other two instant messaging networks are Microsoft's MSN Messenger and Yahoo!, which do not implement interoperability. In the past, manufacturers have also adopted interoperability measures between different enterprise instant messaging systems.
Brian, vice president of AOL in charge of charging and ordering services, said that partners involved in the EFP program should pay AOL every year based on the number of end users connected to AIM, end users can exchange messages with target users at will. AOL also plans to enable other instant messaging functions to be shared to expand this EFP program.