Ensuring Security and Compliance in a Microsoft Live Communications Server Environment.
Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005 (LCS) provides an enterprise grade real-time communications platform for corporate communications such as instant messaging, presence, application sharing, collaboration, voice and video. The obvious productivity benefits of Microsoft LCS have dramatically expanded the use of IM, peer to peer (P2P) file sharing and voice over IP (VoIP) applications in the enterprise, to the extent that industry analysts expect Enterprise IM (EIM) products, including Microsoft LCS, to reach 100! adoption by 2010, with Public IM (PIM) clients, such as MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk and AOL reaching market saturation even sooner.
This paper provides an overview of security issues related to the use of real-time communications and their impact on corporate, operational and regulatory requirements. It investigates the methods available to avoid the circumvention of Sametime usage and also reviews the desired functionality attributes of a third-party solution - long since acceptable in an enterprise email environment. Finally, we introduce FaceTime Enterprise Edition, which, when used as a complementary addition to Sametime, assists in securing real time communications channels and ensures that the appropriate management, security and compliance requirements are met.