Business IM, Group Chat & Microblogging

Cleartext's real time messaging platform replaces public internet chat services that are in use in a work environment with IM, group chat and microblogging services designed for business use.

All types of messages and data (eg from a CRM) are routed with almost zero latency into a single stream where business processes like URL and image filtering, text content filtering and archiving are applied.

Our services are simple to deploy, easy to use and require almost zero management time. We do all the work, you pay per user, team or workgroup, per month.

Read more below or visit our comprehensive feature and plans page.

Effortless Administration

With a web-based administration front-end, set-up is a breeze and maintenance simple & straightforward. Configure service specific parameters through our comprehensive Web Administration interface.

Backups are carried out daily and weekly and it's easy to meet regulatory compliance requirements of major international standards through addition of our SaaS Archiving solution.

Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM)

EIM sounds grand but our services work for any size business/team, in fact we mainly work with smaller businesses with specific requirements, for example;

• You have several locations and want to save phone costs
• Your busines is in a sector(finance) that requires archiving
• Various public IM systems are in use and you want to standardise
• Public IM has introduced malware or spam and you want to remove this risk.

Cleartext EIM uses the industry standard XMPP to route messages and is easily extended using 3rd party software tools that are available for most development environments.

We've used this extensibility to add security and compliance features to our SaaS platform. Cleartext SaaS delivers the following features;

• URL filtering to block phishing and malware links
• Image URL filtering to block innappropriate images
• SSL/TLS to ensure communications are encrypted and protected
• Content rules to block or drop sensitive content or profanities
• Message archiving to permanently record data transfer and conversations.

These features deliver business benefits over and above the collaborative features by ensuring your teams and business are protected against malware, identity theft and litigation.

Many businesses allow their employees to use public instant messaging but there are issues with allow them direct connection to open networks. A lack of archiving, content filtering and the risk of malware infection are all issues that Cleartext EIM addresses.

Group Chat

There are times when a team is working on a project and needs to collaborate in an ad hoc way with other team members. Group chat is ideal for smaller teams to exhange ideas and data.

Phones conferences are expensive, time consuming and tie people up, group or multi-user chat on the other hand brings all parties together and allows them to dip in and out as needed without distracting them from key tasks.

Cleartext persistant group chat is part of our core platform and has the same security and compliance features listed on the 'Enterprise IM' tab.

Group chat allows people to share ideas, data and links. User can run one to one chat with room participants whilst in a chat room, an ideal back channel to the general open chat.

Audio and visual notifications ensure you don't miss part of the conversation and it's all archived on the server and local Cleartext Desktop so you can review it later.

Cleartext Group Chat works with any XMPP/Jabber chat service that hosts chat rooms, opening up thousands of resources across the internet whilst still applying the security and control features of our core platform.

Group chat is included in our standard pricing so you get it for 'free' compared to some other EIM services.

Enterprise Microblogging

Cleartext Enterprise Microblogging uses real time push messaging and live search with powerful aggregation and live stream filtering. Tweets from many different services as well as business systems like CRM and ERP push data into an activity stream on desktop, mobile or other end points for display in near real time.

IM and group chat are fine for small workgroups but chat rooms start to get unwieldily when large numbers of people join in. Public microblogging services, of which Twitter is the best known, manage to scale to many thousands of users.

Our enterprise microblogging add-on builds on group chat, think of it as like Twitter but for work use. It has the key features you'd expect;

• Follow and be followed, obviously!
• Public mentions using @ notation
• Direct private messages (which uses our IM)
• Re-tweets using the RT notation
• Link shortening via bit.ly, is.gd and ctr.im
• Character count, but no 140 character limit
• Real time search and discovery.

There are many collaboration platforms built with web technology, these use HTTP which is a polling or pull technology. At Cleartext we use XMPP a bi-directional push technology which delivers messages in close to real time. Services like Google Talk and Facebok Chat use XMPP.

Why is real time messaging important?

Real time messaging is important for organisations that need close to real time responses, such as some finance sectors like stock or commodities trading, emergency services and news organisations.

Our real time search and discovery feature allows users to setup search keywords and get copies of all tweets that have word matches in them. This means you can track people, clients, topics or unique data types without having to have everyone in your buddy list or be in a chat room.

When using our microblogging service with our desktop app tweets are rendered in an activity stream. Tweets and any other data can be routed into a single message stream with word filters allowing users to uncover important data in real time whilst ignoring noise in the stream.

What is an Activity Stream?

Activity Streams originated from the term lifestream, most people will be used to activity streams whilst using Facebook. We call our activity stream a 'Workstream' because it aggregates business messages and data from many sources. The graphic at the top of this page is a screen capture of our Workstream.

Cleartext Enterprise Microblogging is built on our core platform so benefits from our designed in security and compliance features.

• URL filtering to block phishing and malware links
• Image URL filtering to block inappropriate images
• SSL/TLS to ensure communications are encrypted and protected
• Content rules to block or drop sensitive content or profanities
• Message archiving to permanently record data transfer and conversations.

These features deliver business benefits over and above the collaborative features by ensuring your teams and business are protected against malware, identity theft and litigation.