Microsoft Corp. on Thursday made available the long-awaited beta of its Greenwich real-time communication server along with a strategy designed to make Greenwich an emerging standard for embedding instant messaging and presence detection in other applications.

Greenwich is being positioned as a counterweight to Lotus Software's Sametime IM and presence server, the acknowledged leader in enterprise IM. But while Lotus, of Cambridge, Mass., is devolving Sametime into other applications as Java-based Web services, Microsoft is taking a somewhat different path. It is connecting Greenwich to other applications via APIs (application programming interfaces) rather than federating IM and presence as Web services.

More at eWeek