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convergence: instant messaging

BEING THERE
A recent survey of organisations to discover where they are in their instant-messaging deployment revealed a number of benefits, and some major concerns. by Roger Dean
As an electronic communication tool, instant messaging (IM) has been gaining in popularity. Principally a text medium between people sitting at PCs that communicate through the Internet, IM acts a cross between email and the telephone. It has more immediacy than email, which may not get read for hours, but is less invasive than a phone call, which will immediately interrupt the recipient. It allows you to see who is online and enables conversations such as Where is the meeting?, Are you available for a phone call? and so on. Files can be transferred with the messages and audio or video in some cases. Instant messaging first took off amongst home and student users and is now being adopted by corporate employees who find it helps them to work with their peers, particularly where teams are geographically dispersed and with their customers. It is estimated that there are in excess of 40 million employees worldwide using IM at work. A key aspect of IM is that users can see which of their contacts is online before contacting them. The interface of the IM application contains a list of the people a user has decided he or she may
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Security is an issue, with IM raising the prospect of a new set of vectors for virus and worm attacks

want to communicate with and, beside each name, an icon depicting their availability. There are a number of benefits, principally improved coordination in dispersed teams, internally and externally. But there are potential problems with its use. These issues are much the same as occurred with the adoption of email. The messages may prove to be a productivity distraction for under-employed users and there is a danger of the medium being used for inappropriate content. As with email, identities can be spoofed, which raises similar problems to those now seen with email, such as phishing the attempt to swindle users out of their bank details. IM also opens a further channel for viruses and malicious code to enter the organisation Overall, IM has a beneficial effect on employee productivity but has some issues that need to be managed, as indicated in a survey of members of EEMA, the independent association for e-business, conducted by Ovum and the association. Although the participants in this survey represent a particularly well-informed section of the market, we found the results of this survey to be encouraging. There is a lot of interest in instant messaging and our respondents expect the number of users in their organisations to nearly double during 2005. The survey was validated by the breadth of organisations taking part, each of which is at a different stage of its journey with instant messaging. Indeed several of our respondents are still evaluating their options and do not expect to deploy the technology in 2005, while others already have thousands of users. The survey covers all types of EEMA member, from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through to large multinationals both on public and private networks. In the survey, we found that the average respondent had 6018 users of IM at the end of 2004, and expected to have 11351 at the end of 2005 an increase of 89%. The survey respondents noted a number of

benefits. IM has reduced email traffic and lowered voicemail use. Employees using IM found they were able to make decisions faster and found that communications had improved overall. The respondents felt in the main that IM can play a major role in managing crises, where high levels of communication are vital. IM is widely used by home teleworkers, said respondents and the technology helps with videoconferencing and teleconferencing. There are now IM-enabled helpdesks in place and organisations liked the ability to make the concept of presence available to applications through IM applications programming interfaces (APIs). A presenceenabled company directory is one possibility. The benefits meant that all large organisations said they are planning for future use of IM. However, IM can be disruptive if best practice is not followed, a problem that has been exacerbated by the fact that many organisations do not even realise they use IM. Security is an issue for many, with IM raising the prospect of a new set of vectors for virus and worm attacks. Unsolicited bulk messages through IM, or the recently-coined spim, present a further problem as they will need to be filtered out in a similar way to email spam. With a large degree of unofficial IM use, there is little focus on logging and archiving with few controls or auditing of IM use. There is a lack of open standards among IM systems, and standards will be needed for interoperability, especially as large organisations saw a requirement for mobile-phone use of IM. Technology is being adopted very quickly and accelerated change in itself can often cause problems with the law and regulators. For example, misrepresentation is more likely as IM becomes more widespread. It is important to make it clear what employees can and cannot do business best practice needs to be more granular to clear up the grey areas. However,

EVOLVING STANDARDS
Some standards are starting to appear in the instant messaging world. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) is a proposed standard managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). SIP was originally developed to set up calls for voice-over-Internet-protocol telephony and videoconferencing. SIMPLE extends SIP for IM and defines a standard way of establishing the IM connection, providing support for conferencing, telephony and presence. SIMPLE is backed by IBM, Microsoft and others. The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), formerly known as Jabber, is an open source, XML-based protocol, backed by Hitachi, HP, Intel, Sony and others. It provides server-to-server instant messaging and presence and is an IETF-approved standard.

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convergence: instant messaging

this does not mean repackaging the email and Internet-use policy. Multiple, simultaneous IM conversations mean mistakes can readily happen. For example, inappropriate content or infringement of third-party intellectual property rights can quite easily occur. Also, an increased level of informality escalates the risk of harassment this is now a big issue when there is a blurring from joking to harassment. Organisations are finding that users are often deploying IM in a deliberate manner to circumvent corporate content control: this is particularly relevant in highly regulated environments where tight controls on what employees are allowed to say to external parties are often enforced to

prevent mis-selling and other problems. Archiving issues arise such as, when using noncorporate systems, one user can archive without the other knowing. Conversely, IM could also be used by human resources to micro-monitor work patterns, which could constitute disproportionate monitoring. In the future, IM will introduce new risks. In particular, watch out for content-rich spim clogging up the network. However, in assessing risks, dont overlook the undoubted benefits X of the medium. Roger Dean is head of special projects at EEMA

WHOS IN THE HOUSE?


Availability, or presence as it is more commonly termed in instant messaging (IM) is a key aspect of the medium. A user can have several states: s My PC is connected to the Internet and I am logged into the IM network the user is available for a chat. s I am logged into the IM network but my keyboard has been inactive for five or more minutes: you can leave me a message the interval is determined by the user but this state indicates that the user may not read the message immediately as they may be away from their desk s Do not disturb messages will not be read immediately s My PC is not logged into the IM network messages will not be received s I am not logged into the IM network but any message you send me will be received as a text message on my phone and if I respond, you will receive it in your IM client. Even more presence states will be possible, as mobile phone networks start to interact more closely with IM, perhaps even adding information on where people are in the world through the use of the Global Positioning System and other technologies.

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