When we first purchased IMLogic. I believe we had done a bakeoff with IMLogic, Akonix and Facetime. Public IM worms were common back then. And without a IM security product, virus outbreaks occurred and even when no infection occurred the help desk would get flooded with calls from people who got the viral message but didn’t click on the link thus were not infected.
IMLogic abated the IM threats in public IM and in the internal Live Communications Server. Back then it worked with Sybari Antigen to protect against file transfer malware as well.
But all was not well. Big Yellow needed an IM product and Microsoft needed antivirus for Exchange. Both IMLogic and Sybari were swallowed up. Things began to change. Symantec and Microsoft didn’t want to play ball the way IMLogic and Sybari had. The integration of IMLogic, now called Symantec IM Manager, and Sybari was dropped in favor of Symantec Antivirus. I really wasn’t happy when IMLogic support was merged into Symantec support.
Over time, things settled down, and Symantec IM Manager was relatively static. After a while you start to wonder exactly what is it doing for us? The number of real security detections/blocks is pretty much zero. Most users have moved on to Facebook for chat which isn’t protected.
Recently I began to wonder when support for Microsoft Lync was coming to Symantec IM Manager. The sad news is never. While nothing official has been announced, it looks like Symantec intends to end of life IM Manager. While support will be provided for some time for the existing version, the public IM providers may make changes that break the existing connector. If they do that, it is doubtful a fix would be available. As we upgrade to Lync our biggest use of IM Manager (OCS) will go away.
Symantec recommends going to their cloud solution. I can’t imagine that would be cost effective for us. We’re paying software maintenance right now and it is very cheap. Cloud services are subscription based. Its like buying software new every ear. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to sales, but I dont have the numbers to indicate the need to continue IM security.
Its kind of a sad thing, IM Manager on life support. But when there aren’t big worms, you don’t have new sales. I suspect the IM venders filter most of that in their database nowdays. Without the security need, it is back to being a compliance (IM Logging) sale. Most companies just don’t need that. Another reason I suspect Symantec is getting out is public IM is secondary to Facebook Chat and Skype. If there is no way to expand the product for Facebook, then it is incomplete.
So we’ll see what happens officially. Will they announce a End of Sale? Will the end of support be after my existing contract, or will we have issues?
