Red Hat still mulling over possible Exchange competitor

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6368

Explains how to do it. I'd show them how in the drop of a hat. (pun intended.)

In the context of a story about whether Red Hat will challenge Exchange directly, an analyst says "[Red Hat] may decide sometime in the future that having an open source solution for messaging could be a viable strategy."

What does she mean by "messaging" in this statement? I've heard a lot about "messaging" in the IT press and it struck me that I'm not sure what they mean.

I assumed that they mean "Instant messaging." But is IM mission-critical in a lot of companies? I think a lot of my friends in big companies love the calendar and email functions of Exchange. And I think there is significant synergy to having them integrated. But I've seen people instant messaging with their friends five times for every once that I see them IM'ing a coworker...

I don't work in a big company... Is IM a big part of corporate IT now? Or is "messaging" a code for something else? Or is "messaging" just the "object oriented" of the new century (i.e., the buzzword de jur that has no real meaning, it's just "hot")?

In the enterprise, messaging has a completely different meaning than most people understand.

It's not a word dejour as the practice goes back more than ten years.

Microsoft got itself embedded in the enterprise by scaring everyone with the concept of a year 2000 bug and simply wiped out the older email systems by selling Exchange.

Exchange does many things from managing calendars, providing email, scheduling meetings, managing conference rooms, handling mobile mail clients such as the Blackberry, providing corporate directories so you can find people in a big company, providing forms for things like expense reports or personnel evaluations, faxing, requisitioning, planning, broadcasts, instant messaging, video conferencing, allowing people to work on documents simultaneously, etc.

Also, an important function in large organizations has to do with regulatory required retension of documents for as many as 30 years. So, beeing able to find email, for example, or patient records has become part of the messaging concept.

Enterprises depend on the work flow functions inherent in Exchange and Lotus Notes. Exchange is very popular because Outlook is very popular.

So, messaging means much more than it seems to imply.

I hope that helps.