Aruna Labs Blog

Today we are releasing the next version of Aruna IM. The development team has been working hard to make many small improvements and it shows. Things are working very well and we are happy to introduce a major new feature. Web Conferencing.

Originally, we found that clients and companies using Aruna IM needed to have employees inside their company chatting in a secure manor. That has been solved by Aruna IM and has helped communication and efficiencies within the company. But what to do if you want to chat with a client, a vendor, a temp, a consultant, a supplier or any other third party? You don’t really want to provision an ID on the system for them for both security and management reasons. How do you chat with them easily?

Or what if you want to have a group chat and share some files with a few people involved on a disparate project team? Some people are inside the company and some are in USA and some in Europe, what to do now?

Aruna IM will allow you to create and send a web link to your conference participants, which will direct them to a web page to chat to you and the conference members. It can also be password protected for privacy if you like. And as with the regular Aruna IM, your chat sessions are always secure and encrypted.

The web chat also logs into your history to the server for compliance and regulatory reasons so your legal and compliance departments can remain happy! There is a even a file sharing capability so you can share files internally AND externally during your conferences and chat sessions.

If your company is looking for a corporate instant messaging solution that is secure BOTH inside and outside your company, let us introduce you to Aruna IM.

(Existing customers will be upgraded to the new version automatically)

We have been working hard on the next versions of ArunaIM. There will be several new features and enhancements but the one we would like to talk to you about today is the history capability of ArunaIM.

If you have ever tried to search for conversations, messages, tid bits of text that you know are in your IM history somewhere? Then you go through a process of scouring pages and pages of text in your public IM client and to no avail. A frustrating process.

In the next release of ArunaIM, we have implemented an easy to use history browser and search functions. You can easily sort your history by date/time, individual / conference chat, by contact and also see individual messages or see the entire dialogue. You can also perform keyword search on all or any of the above attributes, select date ranges and more.

In addition, the history is all stored and driven from the server’s database so you don’t need to worry about losing a laptop (and your history with it), backups or having a full record of communications for a legal discovery or audit. And of course compliance and regulatory issues are taken care of as your whole company’s instant message communications are logged, documented, backed up and archived safely.

This past week a worm virus attack on Skype users made front page headlines in some of the technology news sites. The worm sends messages through Skype chat users and asks users to run a file called sp.exe. If a user executes this file, it installs spyware that can steal passwords and other info. It also can connect to a remote server that can install additional malicious code on your computer. Some are calling it a Trojan horse, some a worm. In any case, as usual, do not click to open any files that you can verify their source. Even if it looks like it is from one of your contacts and you see an executable file, ask them first, it is not often that people need to send you an executable file.

We are starting to see more and more of this malicious activity on the public IM networks these days. Unfortunatly, it isn’t going to stop anytime soon either. The spammers and thiefs have found a new outlet to steal personal and corporate information and it is only going to increase.

This is one of many reasons we suggest to companies to ban these public IM services from their corporate networks. The risk of data loss, employee downtime, PR nightmares and the cost to rid the infections far outweighs the costs of getting a secure IM solution made for the needs of Enterprise.

For the last four months we have been beta testing our new secure corporate Instant Messaging product. We are happy to announce that it is now available to businesses.

The product was developed in order to give ourselves, client companies and their 3rd party partners the ability to be comfortable that their IM conversations are secure. The public networks (Skype, AIM, MSN, Yahoo etc.) are just that, public networks. We recommend that businesses do not communicate on these networks, especially if they have trade secrets or do not want others to know the content of their conversations.

Aruna IM provides a secure network and message encryption to ensure privacy for enterprise communication.

The service is a customized, hosted messaging system with yourname@yourcompany.com IDs. No servers for you to buy, maintain or update, just sign up and start communicating in a secure manor!