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Your workers want to use instant messaging (IM) clients at their desks, but you're worried about security. So what do you do? Turn to a robust enterprise IM application like Antepo OPN System, a seasoned tool with excellent security, archiving, and so many other tools that it's like AOL's instant messenger on steroids.

Antepo released version 4.5 earlier this month, seeing it as a natural continuation of the improvements that began with version 4. But we see it as so dramatically improved that it could have easily been version 5.0.

OPN System's improvements begin as soon as you load it. The multi-OS installer now has a wizard interface, making it a breeze to walk through, and it integrates with Active Directory and Kerberos so the whole business of populating your system with your employees names and groups is over in seconds. As you use it, it will keep checking back for updated data, so that you won't need to do anything as people change their names, get promotions, or leave the company.

The automation doesn't end there. As you set up the groups for your company, you can pre-populate people's contact lists with members of the same group, saving your employees the hassle of doing it themselves. A salesperson, for example, will see the entire sales department in his or her list, and the online team members can have quick access to other online people.

Many of the improvements with version 4.5 let you manage your "presence," meaning how and if other people see you online. Our favorite new feature is the "asymmetrical presence subscription," which lets you appear to be out of the office but still lets you see which of your fellow employees are in. We think of it as the "morning coffee" feature; have your morning coffee undisturbed while you scroll through your e-mails and chat with the people you want to chat with. Once you're finished, you can let the whole office know that you're ready to talk.

Other presence features let you create e-mail signatures that announce your presence status, remove your name from other people's contact lists, and set your status automatically to away when your screen saver starts up.

Even the administrator gets new presence features. When the admin sets up OPN System, he or she can specify groups that should never IM each other. It's useful if you have any church-state walls in your enterprise, such as editorial never talking to sales. (How you stop them from picking up the phone or talking in the hallway is your own problem, but at least they can't IM each other.)

Add in features like virtual meetings, the ability to request a user to join an existing chat, filters that let you know when keywords come up in chats, and queued messages that you can respond to when you're free, and you've got an excellent, fully-featured IM tool. It recently became even more robust when Antepo released support for BlackBerry devices.

Pricing is on a sliding scale, starting at $25 per seat for up to 20 users, and dropping down to $12 to $15 per seat if you have thousands of users. That's a one-time fee, although the company charges 20 percent annually for maintenance.

OPN System's IM client lets you see which of your contacts are available, and even lets you set your own presence to unavailable while you're still online.