The ease and convenience of instant messaging has made it popular with users. But is instant messaging a curse or a boon for the office environment?
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IM for business:
Introduction Next-generation IM Putting IM to work IM still not secure 1. SCIM Enterprise Server 2. Lotus Sametime 3. Microsoft Exchange Comparison Sample scenario About RMIT Labs |
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.
Jabber is a good solution. Not only is it an open standard, however, you can find many open source and even commercial solutions.
See: http://www.jabber.org.au/