Staying in touch throughout the day, passing on interesting web sites, sharing a joke, bouncing ideas off each other, deciding when and where to meet. Does that sound like wasting time at work or a virtual workspace for building relationships and sharing information with colleagues?
If you think instant messaging at work is a frivolous distraction with security implications, you're not alone. Companies worry about employees spending too much time chatting, swapping virus-laden files without going through firewall controls or making off-the-cuff remarks about confidential subjects. That's why SurfControl sees a gap in the market for its Instant Message Filter, which stops users running specific IM and file-sharing applications: something that's awkward to do by hand because of the number of different ways these applications connect.
SurfControl suggests that the IT department can pick groups of users who can continue to use IM, but that defeats the point of IM: being able to get in touch with all your contacts, wherever they are. While managers are unhappy that users are installing software without their approval, most people using IM at work will tell you it helps them get their job done faster or better.
It's all about efficiency and convenience. Short conversations without the time lag of email or the intrusiveness of a phone call have huge potential, especially when people work from home or in a different office. IM is invaluable for supporting a colleague on a sales or technical call by sending them useful information. And once a significant proportion are talking by IM, company phone bills should show the difference.
IM can go beyond chatting. Conchango has developed a web service that lets you retrieve details from the corporate directory or customer information from a database. Office 2003 will link documents to authors with a task pane that includes IM as one of a set of collaboration tools.
IM providers are turning employee enthusiasm and business suspicions into a sales opportunity, with corpo rate versions of their free consumer software that add security features - and a price tag.
The priorities for business messaging are different. It's more important to make sure messages are logged and files scanned for viruses than to have amusing icons. Companies want to use their own directory services for the user list, rather than a public server, and they want business features such as whiteboards and shared documents, with options to block file-sending or video chat.
Yahoo! is the first of the free providers with an enterprise IM client. Yahoo! Messenger Enterprise Edition adds encryption, authentication against a corporate directory and message archiving. Administrators can either block file sharing or force virus checking, and an add-in from VeriSign encrypts messages. Yahoo! is counting on frustrated users for leads with its Save Smiley campaign: if companies block Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! tries to sell them the enterprise version.
One alternative to banning free IM clients - and driving determined users to browser-based versions - is controlling them. Analysis tools and security policies let you measure and contain the impact, as long as they include security on the desktop.
The next stage is software from companies such as Blue Coat, FaceTime and IMLogic, which add security features by logging IM conversations, filtering for keywords, preventing file transfers or redirecting IMs between employees to internal servers to keep them off the public network. That's a route Microsoft and AOL are taking: AOL has teamed up with FaceTime and Microsoft with IMLogic.
AOL is adding encryption to version 5.2 of the AIM client (due by the summer), with VeriSign selling the security certificates, but it's also brought out Enterprise AIM Services. These add access control, archiving, local routing and developer tools for integrating messaging with business applications. Directory integration is promised for a future release.
Microsoft's MSN Messenger Connect service already integrates with Active Directory and Exchange, logging messages in an SQL Server database. But Microsoft sees secure and manageable instant messaging as just one tool for what it calls "real-time communication".
When it comes out in autumn, Real Time Communications Server 2003 (codenamed Greenwich) will include management, security and logging tools, but it is also a platform for developing applications to integrate peer-to-peer voice and video conferencing, telephony, application sharing and other ways of working together. Reuters used an early version to develop its secure IM service for banks.
Windows Server 2003 users will get a free cut-down version with presence technology, which shows when users are online and available.
But you don't have to wait for (or commit to) Microsoft technologies to develop applications around instant messaging. Jabber is an open source, commercially supported XML messaging protocol. You can download the Jabber Messenger IM client, run your own company Jabber server and configure it to control such features as file sharing.
You can also integrate messaging with other systems. What the Jabber server basically does is route XML messages - which could come from a person typing or an application or web service - to clients, which can be as simple as telnet connections. There are numerous add-ons for Jabber, including voice messaging and gateways offering interoperability with other IM systems. Jabber is also working on a standard that could bring together the different IM systems, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
The big three's slow response to what business is looking for has encouraged other players. So much so, that Gartner's labelling of 2003 as the year of business IM applies as much to the flood of providers. IBM is a big player with Domino-based SameTime, which it is working on integrating with the WebSphere architecture. Sun offers instant messaging as part of the Sun ONE Portal Server Suite (for Windows and Solaris) and is promising a corporate IM server running on Linux. Oracle's Collaborating Suite includes instant messaging and application sharing with the new iMeeting service. Numerous startups and smaller companies offer IM as part of suites of messaging tools.
The importance of IM in the business world is more than instant gratification for users. Now is the time to see IM in business as an opportunity rather than a threat or a free ride. But with arguments about standards and interoperability still raging, it's hard to choose the right IM tools, let alone a development system.
