The in-house IT staff started evaluating IM server/client combinations in April of 2001. It looked at Microsoft Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, NetLert and several others. Verizon did not, however, look at open source IM systems such as Jabber. "We wanted something that was proprietary that we could control and own," says Lee.
Message content security and control over message logs were the most important issues. While the remotely hosted services had many of the features Verizon was looking for, they had neither the security nor the centralized management the NOC needed. NetLert, however, was built from the ground up to be hosted internally and uses SSL to secure all IM sessions.
After four months of test driving the products, Verizon Online's IT staff picked NetLert, and by late August 2001 had the NetLert system up and running for the entire NOC.
Longabaugh estimates, "On the average, we're saving 30 minutes to an hour per day per person." At that rate, even at NetLert's maximum cost of $40 a seat for life, Verizon Online was saving money within the deployment's first two days.
It also helped that NetLert, with its Java-based server and client, requires minimal resources. Longabaugh describes the NetLert servers, each supporting up to 100 concurrent NetLert users, as utility boxes--generic 500MHz Pentium III servers with 256MB of RAM running Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000 Server. The servers run not just NetLert but also Internet Information Server and SQL Server and work as file servers.
For the clients, "we run mostly Windows 2000 Professional and some XP Professional on everything from Pentiums to Pentium 4s. Including our remote users, we're running just about every Microsoft system known to man." Remote users maintain Verizon's security by connecting through Check Point's VPN-1.
Verizon today isn't using all of NetLert's capacity. The company, for example, first elected to use NetLert's own user directory and is only now hooking NetLert's user directory into the Windows NT domain model. NetLert can also be used with LDAP or Novell Directory Services. Additionally, Java-based NetLert can run on every client OS from OS/2 to Linux to Macintosh.
In the six months since NetLert went to work for Verizon, the company has had no complaints about its IM system. "No problems with it whatsoever," says Longabaugh. "It's turned our NOC from chaos to organized chaos."
Has your organization benefitted from instant messenging? Share your thoughts in TalkBack, or e-mail us.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
