Is instant messaging a curse or a boon for the office environment?
Instant messaging (IM) first became popular in the form of buddy lists and chat rooms on AOL. IM has been available on AOL since the company offered buddy lists to its paying users in 1996. Also in 1996, an Israeli startup called Mirabilis launched a free IM service called ICQ (I seek you). In 1998, AOL decided to launch its own free service and to buy Mirabilis.
The Gartner Group predicts that by 2004, 60 percent of real-time communication—including voice, text, or call-and-response—will be driven by IM technology.
Already, industry experts estimate that over 200 million people use IM, and pundits expect that number to reach 500 million by 2006. It’s catching on in the corporate environment as technology planners recognise the potential for enabling faster communication and creating more opportunities for ad hoc discussions between employees and external partners. The application becomes even more powerful when combined with features like document sharing, whiteboarding, and graphics.
Yet quite a few enterprises are still either blocking access to external IM services due to security concerns, or they don’t have an internal infrastructure to support the technology.
What’s the business use?
If you consider the implications that instant messaging (IM) has for your business, you’ll find that it offers great potential for improving communication between employees and customers alike.
However, once you’ve decided that IM has a place in your business, you face the difficult decision of choosing which IM solution to use. They are not all created equal, and many of the systems don’t play well with each other—at least for now.
One option is to set up your own internal IM solution using one of the packages detailed here. Of course, this isn’t always feasible, particularly for smaller businesses with a limited budget. A second option is to use a public IM provider, which offers the advantage of being inexpensive to implement and gives you the opportunity to begin taking advantage of IM without investing in new hardware or server software.
The security scenario
The same corporate tech planners who recognise the need and benefits of IM cite the lack of security as a critical factor in preventing it from being successful in a corporate environment.
Microsoft researchers estimate that over 30 percent of businesses now use some form of insecure IM capability. Research firm IDC estimates that 70 percent of corporate employees use either business IM or consumer IM services for work-related activities. Still, e-mail remains the only consistent, reliable, secure collaborative tool for most enterprises. But that will change in the next 12 months.
Before corporations make the decision to use IM regularly, they need secure, archivable, and auditable real-time capabilities. Current IM products from AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo are easily hacked. The intellectual property generated by conversations that take place over these channels may not be automatically saved. And without the ability to audit the services, companies have no way of managing the flow of information and protecting trade secrets from escaping through the IM channels.
IBM recently shipped new copies of its enterprise-class IM products, Sametime and QuickPlace. And third-party vendors, including IMlogic and FaceTime Communications, offer add-on products that promise to increase the security and archiving capabilities in current IM implementations.
FaceTime recently announced support for MSN Messenger, giving Microsoft a source for tools that will help customers protect their investment in the use of Microsoft IM networks. The agreement between Microsoft and FaceTime will allow IT pros to deploy strategic IM business applications.
The next-generation IM
Microsoft believes that the most reliable way to present IM as an enterprise-class collaboration platform is to base it on new security features planned for Windows .NET Server and Titanium, the next release of Exchange.
Microsoft has a new initiative, Greenwich, which is designed to include both presence and IM capabilities in the base operating system. Microsoft announced at its recent Exchange conference that it would be decoupling IM from its conferencing server product and moving it into the base operating system next year. Once delivered, Greenwich will allow developers to build applications that use presence information to deliver IM, voice, video, and data sharing collaboration applications in the enterprise.
AOL and Yahoo! also plan to release corporate versions of their popular Instant Messaging products that include encryption and IT administration capabilities.
But IBM clearly isn’t sitting on the sidelines while Microsoft and AOL move to make IM capabilities ubiquitous. IBM is working to integrate its existing Sametime and QuickPlace collaboration tools with its WebSphere architecture. Although AOL has more AIM/ICQ users today than other IM vendors, they’re mostly consumer users. Corporate users are much more likely to adopt a real-time communications platform that has a development platform directly tied to it—either Microsoft’s .NET platform or IBM’s J2EE-based WebSphere platform.
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