I received a debut magazine on messaging today, here is my opinion
Tags :Book Reviews
Today in the snail mail, I received the first
issue of Messaging
News, August 2004 edition. Online
they let you download the PDF of this version, which confusingly is dated
July 2004 unlike the print one. But I digress and move on to thoughts.
It was not a large issue, 30 pages plus
cover. Content accounted for 19 of those pages. But here is
the catch. Of those 19 pages, about 12 or so definitely were like
vendor ads. Not reviews of the vendor product, but like winded ads.
Of special interest to all of us was an
article on page 20 titled The Future of Instant Messaging is Safe, Secured,
and Self Managed by Melisa Labancz-Bleasdale. However, it was
not about the future, it was about a product from Valadian Corporation
called Secure Instant Messenger (SIM). How it does secure IM, provides
high level security, logging, etc etc. They focus on the fact that
SIM uses a removable USB device for mobile workers for higher security
by logging to the USB removing all traces from the pc. Who ever heard
of logging on the server instead? Oh yeah, that Sametime product
and a bunch of others do. Why would I need for NASD compliance to
log to a USB device that can be lost or stolen, removing the IM log. Sounds
like a way to get into more trouble to me. "Hey Bill, I need
your USB to verify you didn't share some information. Oops, I lost
it John."
Knowing this is a new magazine with some
room to grow, I think they need to define what is a vendor article (Ironport
has a big one in there) and what is editorial more. Let the user
know it might read like a giant ad, or that there was actual research done
and in the writers opinion this was the best product. I will take that
approach also as a writer myself. But not here is THE solution and
by the way, it is only about them.
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On Friday, July 30th, 2004 by Chris Miller
