Instant Messing Introduction

 Instant messaging brings the brave new world of real-time collaboration to Exchange 2000.  Instant messaging or IM has been around for a while and many people would be familiar with ICQ, MSN and AOL messengers. For the most part these have been used as a recreational tool to allow people to have quick chats and send quick messages to friends ETC. For some time these have been a bane of corporate networks and seen as another way for people to waste time and bandwidth while they are at work. Times however are changing and with the introduction of Instant messaging within Exchange 2000 and Sametime in Lotus notes its time to re-evaluate instant messaging as a business tool. 

What can Instant Messaging Do?

Real Time collaboration is the big selling point of instant messaging being able to communicate instantly with up to 5 people using a simple text interface.
Status monitoring and awareness is the other big selling point allowing people to see users online status and availability no matter if they are working at the office or remotely. 

Telecommuters

One of the big use’s for instant messaging I can see, is its application for telecommuters. It provides the ability for supervisors to monitor if their staff are online and exchange simple status updates with them. It gives the telecommuter an ability also to have real-time conversations with the all staff in the company no matter where there located..  

Speed

A main benefit of instant messaging over conventional asynchronous messaging is the speed at which communication can take place. Where one email thread could take days to play out, Instant Messaging could replace the necessity for back and forth emailing enabling people to settle problems and make decision quickly. 

Reduces Junk Email

Enormous amounts of junk emails are sent internally these days a lot of these are announcements of real-time events such as their’s cake in the kitchen or Fred is sick today. Instant messaging give you the ability to make announcements in real time to users doing away with the need to send, store and delete these emails. 

Real-time Alerting

Customer Service organizations are realising more the necessity to send and receive real-time alerts and info to and from their customers and partners. This ability to communicate instantly can enhance the efficiently of an operation and the satisfaction of their customers. Instant messaging gives the ability for anything from your helpdesk system to your oven to tell you in real-time that your server is down, you customer wants to spend money or the baked potatoes are done. (This all depends on the code being available to interact with IM) 

What you get with Exchange 2000

The Exchange 2000 Instant messaging implementation gives you a real-time text based messaging service. Like all the Exchange 2000 Internet protocols Instant Messaging has been integrated into Internet Information server and uses the new RVP protocol. The RVP protocol is an extension of HTTP and uses XML to transfer messages and status information. Once your DNS configuration is decided on the actual Instant Messaging set-up is straightforward. Client set-up only requires you install the messenger client and that’s it. The client used for IM is the MSN messenger client that has the additional functionality added to allow a connection to Exchange.  The Client has a straightforward point and click user interface with a minimal amount of functionality. One handy feature included is the ability to invite your IM contact to a NetMeeting, which automatically configures and starts a point-to-point NetMeeting for your users. 

The Dark Side

Of course there is a dark side to every new piece of Technology and Instant Messaging is no exception. Some examples include an increase in the innate chatter that goes on enough over all communication mediums. It’s also a great way to organise people to go to lunch, coffee or a smoko. ETC,ETC.