Instant messaging, once a novelty used primarily in home computing, is now making major inroads in many businesses. Here's a look at what is driving the growth of IM in the workplace and how IM can provide valuable business functionality, including applications beyond simple text messaging. A big increase for the big three
Three of the main IM players -- AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger -- saw an increase in use in the U.S. workplace last year of 110 percent, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, a leading Internet research and analysis firm. Business use of IM rose from 2.3 billion minutes to 4.9 billion minutes. The number of people using IM in the workplace rose 34 percent, from 10 million to 13.4 million in the same period. Each of these three players saw an increase in usage. AOL was up 17 percent to 8.8 million users, MSN Messenger was up a whopping 88 percent to 4.8 million users, and Yahoo! Messenger almost matched that phenomenal growth with an 83 percent increase to 3.4 million users. Statistics aside, what benefits have these 17 million found in using IM in the workplace? When online chat was confined to text messaging alone, I never quite grasped the utility of it. Sure, it was handy for connecting with another home user who had a tendency to keep his or her only phone line tied up with an Internet connection. But in a business environment, it always seemed more efficient to simply walk over to someone's office when we needed to talk. However, today's IM applications are a far cry from those early text-only novelties, as they have essentially taken on the mantle of a desktop conferencing application. Putting IM to work
IM still begs the question, "What's it good for in the workplace?" If you continue to look at IM as a vehicle for text-only chat, the answer is, "Not much." But the capabilities of today's IM applications go well beyond that and so do its potential uses. Let's say your company has offices in other geographic locations, and you spend a respectable amount of your time on the phone with coworkers in those other offices. Long distance phone charges can mount in a hurry, particularly if any of those offices are located overseas. IM can provide a valuable communications solution in this scenario. With the use of the "voice chat" features available in many of today's IM suites, you can even have the equivalent of a speakerphone conversation using IM. This type of Voice over IP (VoIP) application is a good example of one of the many technologies that have become much more feasible and user-friendly with the proliferation of high speed Internet. Voice chat over most dial-up connections provides mixed results at best, and often it isn't worth the effort. With broadband, however, you can achieve excellent audio quality that rivals (or even surpasses) that offered by most of the world's phone systems. So rather than pick up the phone and dial Hong Kong, you grab your mouse and start a voice chat session. Figure A shows one IM user inviting another to have a voice chat in MSN Messenger.

Figure A

You can even bring in multiple parties to a voice chat, and you can do all of this without paying for phone charges. You don't need a lot of expensive audio conferencing equipment, either. You need only a computer with a microphone, speakers, and a high-speed Internet connection. Another benefit to using this feature is that you don't tie up company phone lines, which is a potential boon for a small business that needs to make do with a limited number of lines.