While AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, and Yahoo Messenger have found a home on corporate desktops, often times an organization needs to have an enterprise class instant messaging solution like Office Communicator 2007 in place to ensure security and auditing of instant message that bounce around behind their firewall and extend out to customers and partners.
Here are some tips for building the better corporate instant messaging deployment:
- Take an instant messaging census of your user community. Instant messaging is best known to have a following amongst younger workers. However, some corporate cultures are very IM friendly and some organizations might not be IM friendly. As such it is important for a deployment team to attempt to gauge instant messaging acceptance within their end user community.
- Conduct a corporate IM pilot program. A pilot program with a select group of users prior to rolling out an enterprise instant messaging solution is a necessity prior to deploying a corporate instant messaging solution.
- Evangelize the benefits of corporate instant messaging. During the pilot and overall rollout of your IM solution,
the deployment team needs a person or persons who will communicate the
benefits of corporate IM and how it will help users become more
productive.
- Develop corporate IM etiquette and security standards. While
IM might be second nature to some users, introducing it into a
corporate environment needs to account for changes in online
communications and security. You should also pay attention to users who
don't use IM at home.
- Consider the benefit of opening your IM system to the public Internet. While there are merits
of restricting your corporate IM system within the firewall, there are
also many benefits to opening your corporate IM system to the public
Internet provided the IM system you chose support IM protocols from
AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. It is hard to deny
that in some organizations, IM is outpacing email as the preferred
online communications medium.
- Remember your mobile workers. If you also support mobile workers, then make the necessary arrangements that they are represented in your pilot and any particular deployment requirements are accounted for in your deployment plan.
Rolling out a corporate grade instant messaging solutions requires
planning, security considerations, and solid communications with the
end user community to ensure a successful deploymet
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