Putting IM to work
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IM for business:
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IM still begs the question, “What’s it good for in the workplace?” The capabilities of today’s IM applications go well beyond text-based chat and so do its potential uses. Let’s say your company has offices in other geographic locations, and you spend a respectable amount of your time on the phone with coworkers in those other offices. Long distance phone charges can mount in a hurry, particularly if any of those offices are located overseas.
With the use of the “voice chat” features available in many of today’s IM suites, you can even have the equivalent of a speakerphone conversation using IM. This type of Voice over IP (VoIP) application is a good example of one of the many technologies that have become much more feasible and user-friendly with the proliferation of high speed Internet. With broadband, you can achieve excellent audio quality that rivals (or even surpasses) that offered by most of the world’s phone systems.
You can even bring in multiple parties to a voice chat, and you can do all of this without paying for phone charges. Another benefit to using this feature is that you don’t tie up company phone lines, which is a potential boon for a small business that needs to make do with a limited number of lines.
Many of today’s popular IM applications support videoconferencing—the benefits of videoconferencing really depend on your business and the value you attach to being able to see the other people in the conference. However, videoconferencing is still one area where there remains room for improvement in IM services. Even with a broadband connection, getting smooth video and reasonably fast frame rates is difficult, particularly if you throw in other collaboration features that can also soak up available bandwidth. Nevertheless, expect video quality on IM services to improve enough in the near future to rival dedicated videoconferencing systems.
Today’s IM applications don’t stop at text chat and audio/video conferencing. File sharing is another handy IM feature. Let’s say that you need to quickly share a document with a coworker in another location. You could send the document by e-mail, but the message is subject to delivery lag time and workload of the e-mail servers involved. With IM, you can transfer the file right away and not worry about lag time.
IM also offers application sharing, which can be a great feature for providing technical assistance. Application sharing can even go one step further and offer remote control features that allow you to access an application on a remote user’s desktop to share information, fine-tune a document or presentation, or help resolve a technical question.
Although you can get remote control features with Windows XP’s Remote Assistance or third-party applications such as pcAnywhere or VNC, the IM solution is more attractive for most users because the applications are free and generally easier to set up and use. In addition, all your other collaboration features are built in and available in a single application. That means you can easily have a chat while you share an application or document.
Even the text-only component of IM has uses in the business world. Let’s say you’re negotiating a big sale or a new contract on a conference phone call with both a coworker in another location and an important client. You and your coworker can exchange information and strategise in real time through IM while you carry on the phone conversation.
Text chat also has important uses within the organisation when you need to communicate quickly with coworkers. For example, you can use IM without disrupting a meeting, something that probably wouldn’t be feasible with video or audio chat.
-Jim Boyce
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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/