Like any Internet user I use IM daily. Like most, I use it to stay in touch with my friends, but every day for the past four years I've also been using IM to communicate with my editors over at Linux.com. Even this book was vetted out with Packt editors over IM.
While you might be impressed by the IDC figures and how IM works for "me", neither means anything if IM doesn't work for "you". IM is about communication—instant, real-time, communication. But of course, IM isn't the only real-time collaboration tool available. In addition to the telephone, the other digital communication tool you have access to is email.
I will not start a flame war here on which tool is the best, but rather will tell you how it ends. When the dust settles on the 'IM versus email versus telephone' battle and the purists retreat, there is only one option—to use all three tools together. Despite the fact that each tool has advantages over the other, because this book is about IM, let me just tell you what IM can do for you that email and telephone can't; at least not with the same efficiency as IM:
IM is the coyote of communication: There's no faster means of communication than IM. It's called "instant messaging" for a reason. Your messages are delivered instantaneously. Also bear in mind that an IM can carry pictures, documents, or anything else that you could have attached to an email, with the same ease as a plain text message.
True interactivity with typing notifications: With IM, you don't have to wait for your email to be read and replied to. As a journalist for Linux.com, speed is very important to me. When working on a breaking news story, neither my editors nor myself can afford to bounce emails to each other, sorting clarifications or edits. Also, IM guarantees that your message has been read and will be replied to. Emails do not come with such a guarantee. No other form of digital communication offers the chance to communicate in real-time. You can mark emails as important, and flag them for a response, but if you need prompt action, there's no faster or more reliable way of communicating than with an IM.
Less chance of misunderstanding: Because IM conversations are instantaneous, the chance of being misunderstood is pretty low. With emails, misunderstandings can linger for a while—at least until someone gets a chance to explain. Because IM follows the natural flow of a conversation, misunderstandings are quickly cleared up.
Better for brainstorming ideas: Because physical team meetings don't happen at the drop of a hat, managers often resort to email for their brainstorming sessions. But such emails suffer from a severe infection which is the biggest known reason for reduced productivity—CC'itis. Also, long threads of email, with multiple recipients, are difficult to follow and manage.
A true extension to your phone book: Email has an address book that lets you manage your contacts, but an IM contact list goes a step further by binding your list of contacts with the power of presence. IM uses a technology called "presence awareness" to detect who is online, so that can see at a glance whether the people with whom you want to communicate are online. Now, can your phone do that?
Knock-knock notification: IM's biggest benefit that'll affect you more than any other feature is its unobtrusiveness. What helps you stay on top of things is a little feature called notifications. These are alerts that let you know when a contact wants to communicate with you, and notify you when someone you'd like to chat with comes online.
Cheap: Several of the features mentioned above can be accomplished, to some degree, with a telephone. The telephone offers true interactivity, and is ideal for group meetings. But you surely run the risk of catching someone at a "bad time" or of using an outdated contact list. The biggest concern for most companies, however, is cost. If I were using traditional methods of communication, I'd be bankrupt—there are several thousand miles and a couple of time zones between me and my editors in the UK and US. IM helps in keeping your communication—costs down, irrespective of whether you work in a one-office home-office setup, or a multinational corporation.
As I mentioned previously, the only way enterprises could safely allow IM proliferation was if they could apply necessary control. Some companies decided to apply "soft" control over public IM, by restricting, limiting, and pre-screening access. Others opted for more concrete steps, looking for a greater degree of control and, more importantly, privacy. These were the first users of EIMs.
By bringing the EIM infrastructure in-house, with an EIM server, a business can truly manage IM sessions, completely eradicating concerns about security and privacy. As with any good server application, an EIM system is also designed to function like any other enterprise application, offering centralized management, and directory and user integration with corporate directory systems such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
Because an in-house EIM server is tailor-tweaked to fit an organization, it does offer some level of customization not found with public IM. This allows a business to integrate IM and its features with other enterprise applications, like corporate email, intranet portals, ERP, and Supply Chain Management solutions and services such as over-the-network telephony.
There's no denying the advantage of an in-house EIM solution, if you want to effectively deploy, regulate, and be in charge of this new and useful means of communication.
There's no dearth of IM systems available. As we'd like to keep things under control and have decided to roll our own IM service, the next obvious question is: what features should we look for in an EIM solution? Not all products are the same, but like email, there are some features common to all and without which you wouldn't call them an IM system.
In this section, we're not discussing those features that are common and obvious; we're identifying the features that separate a good IM solution from an average one. Understanding these features will help us select an ideal, cost-effective solution that not only delivers now, but also grows as the company around it grows:
Authentication: Checking the credentials of the users is the foremost task of a server of any kind. A good IM server should make the task of managing users fairly simple. Rather than insisting on managing users themselves, an IM server should be capable of interfacing with third-party authentication systems, such as Directory Server. This also keeps things simple for your employees who won't have to maintain more than one username and password to access multiple services.
Security: Like all systems in the enterprise, ensuring security is a prime concern. In the case of IM, security becomes all the more important because of the nature of communication. You need an IM system that takes security for messages pretty seriously as they fly across the network,. Some commonly-used security features include secure sign-on, digital signatures, and good ol' encryption.
Protection against infection: This feature of an IM system flows from another feature—interoperability. Because a good IM system wouldn't discriminate against users of a particular operating system, it has to make sure it doesn't transmit virus-infected files between users. Having your IM system use a third-party anti-virus product for scanning files before transmission is a good idea.
Logging: Regulations in some sectors mandate keeping logs of all communication, including IM. Even if it doesn't, monitoring conversations or keeping logs isn't a bad idea. Not only does logging prevent users from misusing the system but some IM systems also have features such as on-the-fly keyword flagging that will alert the appropriate person in case of misuse. If you are required to keep logs, then make sure that the system keeps them in a format that's easily accessible.
Extensibility: The features I've listed above are more or less what you need an IM system to have. Some products are more feature-rich than others. You need a system that offers you the basic set of features needed to get started and then offers exotic ones as extensions or plugins. If you use other services, you should also look for a system that plugs into those services if applicable.
Administration: Adding an IM server to the mix of existing network services increases the administration load. You have to make sure that the IM system doesn't get in your way too much, is easy to manage, and can run on its own, once it's configured and operational.
Not too demanding system requirements: Finally, you have to weigh in what the IM system brings to the table versus what it requires from you. Like most server software, an IM server in itself doesn't require much. But as the number of users using the service increase, the service exerts more pressure on the physical hardware supporting it. Additionally, IM is an always-on service; therefore, you are looking at a machine that can handle the load of possibly hundreds of simultaneous users generating megabytes of logs.