Zardon

Continuing efforts to make money from its instant messaging network, AOL Time Warner's America Online unit is taking the wraps off improvements to its IM enterprise gateway software and client.

Most importantly, the new edition of the free AOL Instant Messenger client -- Version 5.2 -- adds support for Public Key Infrastructure-based encrypted instant messaging and file transfers, a feature that AOL began testing in the software in spring.

Version 2.0 of the AIM Enterprise Gateway, which AOL and its resellers license to businesses, adds support for the logging and auditing of encrypted communications. That's crucial for corporations that wish to deploy IM services within the enterprise, but are reluctant to do so if they lack the same sorts of security and archiving protections they've long enjoyed with e-mail.

It's also a key addition for AOL, which is anticipating that businesses will license its Gateway to administer IM traffic instead of using one of the myriad third-party IM gateways on the market, standardizing on a rival solution like those offered by Microsoft or Yahoo! , or shutting off IM entirely.

To that end, the company has been promising to add encryption since even before it launched the offering in November. More than a year ago, AOL brought in Internet security giant VeriSign to serve as the PKI certification authority for Enterprise AIM users. It also struck a deal to use technology developed by third-party gateway vendor FaceTime Communications as the basis for the Gateway.

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