Forwarding your Business with Instant Messaging

Instant Messaging is rapidly becoming accepted in the business community as a viable communications tool and process it’s faster than e-mail, free on the client side, even a novice user can easily grasp the interface in just a few minutes and it enables remote workers and business partners to “talk” and share files and information effortlessly using the in-place infrastructure of the internet. Its mushrooming in popularity too according to IDC, corporate and general business users will jump from 5.5M in 2001 to close to 200M by 2004.

What are some of the pitfalls and concerns you need to have when assessing and integrating Instant Messaging (“IM” another biz acronym) with your business processes? Be aware you are sending clear text messages over the public Internet so all IM technology is inherently insecure. Privacy issues can also be raised – these messages are typically archived via the IM servers of the company whose services you are using and can be made public at a later date. Anyone with a network scanner may have access to and be reading your messages and if your are downloading files, you need to ensure your anti-virus software is setup to scan these files when you open them.

One of the biggest pitfalls of the technology and process is that it adds another communications layer to your busy day – but you can offset this by selecting or filtering who you communicate with at any point by using the IM interface to block all or selected individuals from “seeing” you when you are online.

Finally, like all things in today’s computer industry (or many) each of the Instant Messaging vendors are trying to build applications which don’t integrate with the other (no surprise here arrogance has not faded away in the business community!). So, you need to assess the installed base of the market leaders and make a decision on which company’s product you want to utilized my recommendation would be to review Microsoft’s or AOL/Time Warner’s products their installed bases are in the 200 million users plus when combined (these numbers include consumer and business usage) and they both work well and have user interfaces that are intuitive.

There is one alternative company that is solving the “IM Tower of Babel” issues and claims to integrate well with all proprietary apps by utilizing XML technology, Jabber, Inc., www.jabber.com So, if interoptability is important to you then I would recommend assessing their products.

Most of the IM providers including Microsoft are integrating voice communications with their IM clients you may be able to bypass your local telephone carrier at some point using this technology, but don’t bet on it anytime soon, all of those lobbyists here in the states need to keep generating fees on behalf of their telecom clients in Washington D.C. We use Microsoft’s IM product and we have upon occasion utilized the voice and video features (you must of course have a multimedia setup for your PC and camera) and they do work. Although the video quality is a little jerky and the voice is akin to the old Citizens Band (“CB”) radio – your Internet connection impacts the quality of both.