Intranet Journal
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Instant Messaging: Corporate Productivity Tool or Cool Toy?
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With the exception of e-mail, few applications in computing history have become as popular as quickly as instant messaging (IM). Building on a base of IM use on home computers, IM now represents a revolution in corporate communications. Gartner Group forecasts 70 percent of all enterprises will use IM in 2003, and that by 2005 IM will represent 50 percent of all business-to-client communication.
Why has IM become so popular? Is it because, as the name suggests, it's instant? Or is it because it fits so well into the no nonsense "just the facts" style of business communication that we seem to love so much today?
This first in a series of articles on Instant Messaging looks at how IM came to be, and discuss the future of IM as a corporate communications tool. I'll also examine some of the issues that must be considered before you deploy IM in your business.
The Beginnings of IM
The beginnings of IM can be traced back to 1996 when a handful of companies started producing client software that allowed you to chat in real-time with other people who had the same software. The generally accepted pioneer of IM was Mirabilis with its ICQ (short for "I Seek You") client. Although ICQ may have been one of the first widely available IM clients, it didn't take long for major Internet players such as AOL, MSN (Microsoft), and Yahoo to see the appeal of IM products, and the volume of interest from users.
Today, AOL is regarded as the leader in IM. Its substantial market share has come from two sources. First, as the world's largest ISP, it provides AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to its subscribers. Second, it provides the AIM client free of charge, via download, to anyone who wants it. In the IM market, momentum is everything and AIM has plenty of it.
Other vendors like MSN and Yahoo have sought to unseat AOL but have so far been unable topple the little orange man from his perch. The award for the fastest growing IM network goes to Microsoft's MSN Messenger by virtue of the fact that it's bundling the Messenger client into Windows XP (and has the lawsuits to prove it). Yahoo! Messenger also holds sizable market share, as does ICQ, though they pale in comparison to the AIM and MSN Messenger share.
AOL bought Mirabilis in 1998, though the company (which is now called ICQ Inc.) and its pioneering ICQ instant messaging client are still going strong. Today ICQ has an almost cult-like following with what many people see as the independent face of IM. AOL is looking to integrate the ICQ and AIM networks at some point in the future.
Today's IM clients and networks have progressed since the earlier versions, though not as much as you would expect. What has changed is the multitude of platforms from which you can access your IM client. Today, IM is a tool that works on wireless and handheld devices as easily as it does on a desktop PC. Modern IM also allows multi-way chat, robust file transfer, and in some cases whiteboard functionality so that you can draw your ideas for others to see.
In short there is an IM revolution going on. The question is not whether you will use IM in your organization, but how will you manage its use?
IM Standards
Although IM's acceptance has been rapid and widespread, even now there are no standards that define how the different IM products communicate. This lack of interoperability means that IM users must choose a network. For IM providers like AOL the lack of interoperability is not a big issue — the more users they have on their IM networks, the more likely other users will be to sign up. For corporate users it's a particularly sore point, though, as it hinders business-to-business and business-to-client communication.
The discussions related to IM standards have been going on for years, and despite the involvement of bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), there are still no definitive IM standards in place. To combat the problem, some companies are producing IM clients that act as a front end to the different networks. One such product is Trillian Pro, from Cerulean Studios, which allows you to connect to ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and IRC networks through a single interface. It should be noted that these clients do not offer interoperability between the various IM networks — just a unified interface through which to access them. If you are looking for true interoperability then hub software, which can actually route messages between networks, is required. We will discuss hub software in a future article.
The lack of cooperation between IM vendors has caused some market sectors to make a stand. The Financial Services Instant Messaging Association (FIMA) was recently created by some of the world's largest financial services companies including Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Warburg. Tired of the infighting between IM vendors, FIMA announced that it was looking to the IETF standards to bring the necessary uniformity to the IM market.
Those standards, and the most likely winner thus far, are the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a protocol for the establishment of IM communication, and its associated SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions SIMPLE (SIMPLE). SIP and SIMPLE are being adopted by Microsoft and some other major IM players for enterprise IM applications, which I'll discuss in a minute.
If, as is expected, SIP and SIMPLE become the standards for IM it will still be many years before they find their way on to public IM networks. AOL, for example, says that it is no longer interested in SIP and SIMPLE because implementing the protocol into its IM network would be too expensive.
Keeping IM Inside
IM has become so prevalent in companies that in some cases it is now an assumption that you can contact someone else with an IM. The problem is that the vast majority (some estimates put it at around 90%) of corporate IM use is via a public IM network. That brings up concerns about security, which we discuss next, and a lack of manageability and control.
To combat the potential risks from public IM systems such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo!, Enterprise IM solutions allow some of the risks to be minimized, and others to be negated, by providing IM systems that are designed to be hosted on servers within the corporate network. In some cases, such as Novell's GroupWise Messenger, the product is part of another program (in this case GroupWise). Other companies prefer to have their EIM systems as a completely standalone separate entity or as an addition to an existing IM product.
EIM can also enhance the IM experience by providing additional functionality to the client as well as including back-end improvements in the areas of security, logging and monitoring, and administration. In future articles we will take a detailed look at EIM offerings and related products.