Business Services

AIM® Business Services bridges communities and commerce, establishing the first public business-grade instant messaging platform for the enterprise. As a major connectivity provider for private IM communities, the AIM Network is your gateway to almost 75% of the Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) community through partnerships with leading EIM vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Jabber, Antepo, Parlano, Omnipod and Communicator.

With millions of messages handled daily, AIM Business Services provides the network reliability you have come to expect from AIM, along with the scalability, security, and extended reach that your business requires.

AIM Identity Services

AIM Identity Services enable a company to reserve a screen name domain to maintain consistent business identities across e-mail and instant messaging. With AIM Identity Services, a company can provision users with AIM screen names that follow the structure user@domain to match corporate e-mail address structure. This helps make screen names easier to remember and gives a serious name to AIM communications with partners and customers.

AIM Identity Services work with standard AIM clients and are available as hosted or on-premise editions. Both solutions perform checks to verify that a user is authorized to use a domained screen name. The hosted edition checks names against a company-supplied user name list stored in an AOL directory. The on-premise edition checks names against the company's Oracle, SQL or LDAP data store via a secure connection.

Features Overview

  • Lets a company match e-mail address and AIM screen name, giving a more professional face to company communications.
  • Hosted edition allows a company to get a domained screen name service up and running fast without special software installation on company premises.
  • On-premise edition lets a company control AIM authentication from the corporate user store.

Hosted Edition – Available Fast

The AIM Identity Services hosted edition is ideal for organizations that want to acquire professional AIM screen names for their user base fast – without new software installations or changes to system configurations. The service is hosted in AOL-owned and operated state-of-the art data centers. A comprehensive role-based user provisioning and administrative tool is provided to IT administrators to help provision and manage users. Using the tool, administrators can create, validate, suspend or remove user domain name screen names from the AOL directory.

On-Premise Edition – Authentication & Authorization via Corporate User Store

On-premise AIM Identity Services are right for organizations that want the additional security of controlling AIM authentication from the corporate user data store (LDAP, Oracle or Microsoft SQL). The AIM Federated Authentication Service provides this additional security by establishing an interface between AOL and the company's user store and moving the authentication step from AOL to the company's user store. Moving authentication and authorization to the company's user data store allows the company to permit or deny access to AIM based on login and password and additional rules defined by the company. For example, a company can restrict access to users who log-in from the corporate network. Additionally, all user information, including passwords, is stored on the company network.

AIM User Experience

Authorization and user authentication that allow a user with a domained screen name access to the AIM service are performed by the corporate user store or AOL directory for hosted solutions. This process is transparent to the user. Once access is granted, the user experience is identical to the traditional AIM service. The AIM client remains free although there is a charge for the Hosted Edition and the On-Premise Edition.

AOL Data Centers

The AIM service is managed in AOL-controlled, restricted access data center facilities. Data facilities are custom designed to ensure high service availability, including onsite power and refrigeration plants and 100% system redundancy with no single point of failure to ensure continuous operation.

AIM Bot Services

Bots are instant messaging screen names that deliver simple and rich text to AIM users via instant message windows. They can be programmed to access almost any kind of data sources to deliver information for web self-service.

  • Consumer Bot – typically used to provide an information service functionality or a customer service capability.
  • Enterprise Bot – Used to access internal applications within a corporation for immediate results. Examples include: Trading Desk Bot, WSJ, SmarterChild, Millionaire Bot.

Benefits

  • Ability to send real-time presence based alerts
  • Screen names can be provisioned for millions of daily sessions
  • Easy & quick access to applications using text simple interaction
  • Ability to access Bot via desktop or any AIM enabled mobile device
  • Use of AIM Certified Partner Logo