Instant messaging offers many benefits for smaller businesses, but also presents surprising choices and real risks. Ignoring IM is no longer an option.
For smaller businesses, the question is no longer "To IM or not to IM?" but "How to IM?"
Instant messaging is rapidly becoming the way people work as well as network. Less intrusive than a phone call, IM is invaluable for business communications because it tells you who is available -- often called presence -- and can get you answers in real time, often much faster than e-mail exchanges.
Bottom line: Your company needs IM. And, even if your company doesn't support IM, even if you forbid its use, chances are that right at this moment quite a few of your employees are typing away in an AIM or Yahoo IM window.
Whether your employees use IM for business or social communication, uncontrolled, unregulated use could be dangerous to your company and your networks. Just because your employees are using IM under the corporate radar doesn't meant the company isn't responsible for the information traveling back and forth in that text window.
For example, at my online retail bookstore, we forbade IM use, but that didn't stop a link from an employee's Yahoo Instant Messenger account effectively shutting down our entire operation for more than a month as we tried to figure out where, how, who, and why someone started selling stolen cameras on Amazon via our bookstore.
The Legality of IM
The legal ramifications of IM use are still in flux, but there's a clear progression toward IM correspondence being just as important as letters, e-mail, or phone conversations. In 2003, the National Association of Securities Dealers, now the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, mandated that members monitor IM the same way they do e-mail. So even if you're not archiving IM conversations, someone else who could sue you could be.
To stay safe and maximize productivity, your best strategy is to figure out how to make instant messaging safe, reliable, and regulated. Apart from allowing users to do whatever they want -- not recommended -- you have three basic instant messaging options:
- Block all use of IM
- Allow and support a standard free IM solution
- Shell out for a paid IM provider, either hosted or running on-site on your servers and software
Forbidding all IM traffic may seem like the easiest and safest way to go -- and you may want to consider that approach until you decide how to manage your risks. But IM does have real business benefits, especially for distributed workforces, and blocking IM isn't necessarily that easy, as many hacks and services, including tunneling and port-crawling programs, make it easy for your employees to log into free public IM services. (In fact, many IM programs are port-crawlers themselves, including AOL's AIM.) Dedicated IMers will quickly figure out how to get around most firewalls. Even blocking all installations of outside programs may not do the trick, especially for users on Apple-based systems with iChat pre-installed.
Next Page: Set IM Free
