AOL Instant Messenger Goes Corporate

Today, AOL will be launching its new AIM Pro service, targeting the corporate market with features such as enhanced security and online meeting services.

The new service will be available for free and offer WebEx and Microsoft Outlook integration to further entice corporate users away from more traditional offerings such as Lotus Sametime from IBM.  In the future, AOL will also offer premium packages for a fee that include management consoles, logging and other regulatory compliance features, an attempt to break into the IM Security field, fighting the likes of Symantec and their IM Manager product.

The main down-side is that the Pro client will be limited to AOL IM, ICQ and GoogleTalk users, leaving out Yahoo and MSN Messenger.  This lack of interoperability opens the way for third party connector tools to be brought into the corporate environment.

AOL Pro can be downloaded here.