Does any one use IM in a corporate enviroment ie for work reasons ?

The reason for the question is I'm looking at a new product and need to get a feel for the potential market.

Cheers


Jeff

 

Hi Jeff

All of our support team use Yahoo Messenger to communicate.

Steve.
http://www.GetEdenbridgeADSL.co.uk

 

The company I used to work for used AOL INstant messenger, very handy for support operations, quicker than email and cheaper than the phone, nice to be able to hold "conference call" style discussion chats with people around europe, all for free.

I've since changed divisions and found most users on MSN messenger, a little too "Microsoft" for my liking, so I use trillian (www.trillian.cc) which is a single messaging app that will connect and communicate with AOL \ MSN \ ICQ \ Yahoo simultaneously, very handy!

 

The product I'm looking at is an IM Appliance based around Jabber which can come with a company look and feel client. It would be more secure for companies to run their own IM server and its something that they could, possible extend to their major clients....

Just trying to get an idea if it's worth taking on or not....

Jeff

 

Jeff

I do. Used to be in a team of 8 or so who all sat together. However each of the functions (design/security/management etc) ended up after a re-shuffle in different buildings plus we WFH alot.

We use IM (Microsoft) to keep in touch. very useful whilst on audio conferences to be able to check things within the team and co-ordinate defence/attack

Sharing the odd quick file/url etc.

 

When you say taking on, do you mean providing the software / service as a venture or deploying it at your own company? Sorry if I am being thick...

 

Sorry....taking on as in a product to sell....

 

We've got a couple of internal IM systems, being ICQ Corporate and MS IM which hangs off our infant Exchange 2000 system. Both have advantages, MS IM has a more intuitive interface and supports voice but ICQ can do group broadcasts.

 

Sometimes use MSN to speak to the guys back at the ranch whilst out on-site. Bit more descrete than yakking on the blower.

 

I, or should that be we? use MSN in house. Mainly as it's great for talking to the chaps in the USA office. plus it's a live thing, where as email is not.

We've looked at yahoo messenger and others, but MSN seems to fit quite well.

We did consider having an IRC channel, but kinda dismissed it, though personally I'd prefer that.

 

We have MSN installed in our office with about 12 people using and about 5 people remotely.
It works fine but the only problem we had was with outlook mail boxes. The majority of the company use Lotus Notes mail but the Operations Team use Outlook (for a forth coming rollout to Sharepoint and Outlook). Basically if IM was running outlook would hang for a few seconds and then be really sluggish. As soon as you logged out of IM it was mine. But we sorted that we a domain level policy (GPO).

I use AOL at home and that has a built in chat feature and I can't say that it's any better (or worse) than Microsoft's Instant Messenger.

Darren

 

What about Trillian? (www.trillian.cc). It's very good, it's free, and it supports all 4 major chat platforms (AIM, MSN, IRC, ICQ).

(just realised it's already been mentioned, but mentioning it again can't hurt )

[Edited by MarkO - 27/05/2002 11:25:51]