By Dinesh C Sharma, 25 August 2004 08:20
NEWS The use of instant messaging in the workplace and from mobile devices continues to grow, according to an America Online survey released on Tuesday.
Nearly 27 per cent of all IM users surveyed said they use instant messaging at work. This represents an increase of 71 per cent over last year, AOL said.
Seventy per cent of those who use IM at work do so to communicate with colleagues, while 34 per cent use it to interact with clients or customers. Eleven per cent of office IM users said they have used instant messaging at work to avoid a potentially difficult in-person conversation, and 62 per cent send occasional instant messages during their workday to check in with family and friends.
Researchers that found mobile usage is up as well, with 19 per cent of IM users sending instant messages or SMS (Short Message System) messages from mobile phones and PDAs. That's up from 10 per cent last year.
All these IM users don't necessarily translate into business for the IM companies, however. In June, AOL and Yahoo discontinued their for-fee IM offerings for enterprises, citing difficulties in convincing companies to pay for software that their workers are using for free anyway. AOL intends to transfer its existing customers to IMLogic, which is running a similar programme for businesses.
The AOL survey polled 4,510 respondents age 13 and older, in the top 20 American markets. Opinion Research conducted the study in June and July for AOL.
Among the factors fueling IM use is the penetration of high-speed internet connections, according to the survey. About 71 per cent of IM users said they access the internet at home using a high-speed connection, and 29 per cent of those with high-speed access said this enables them spend more time messaging. The most important IM features are photo sharing, customisation and file sharing, the survey said.
Edmund Fish, senior vice president and general manager at AOL, said in a statement: "It's clear that instant messaging has now gone mainstream. It's helping people do everything from spark new relationships to increase their productivity at work."
Dinesh C. Sharma writes for CNET News.com
Comments
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1. anonymous
It's a real menace - we banned and blocked IM throughout our organisation after it was used for 'harassment/abuse' by a couple of employees, but then our biggest customer insisted on us using it to communicate with them for global conferencing (which seems fairly pointless as they're a telco who could presumably host a telephone conference at zero cost, but there you go....)
So we're stuck with it for use with clients, but continue to ban its use for any other internal or external communication (enforced by using Cryoserver to track all use). IM seems to be where email was five years ago - it's used to communicate private, informal or illicit material with little fear of detection.
2. Joseph Grahame
Cryoserver does not seem to have the capacity in order to retain IM conversation and audit. If you had of purchased a leading solution like Ilumin or KVS you could have integrated something like Akonix.
Cryoserver dont have the budget yet to progress to this level although they will probably say they can! If they do then ask for a full list of customers.
3. Michael Dexter
'Joseph Grahame' is misinformed, or mischievous - Cryoserver captures IM, VoIP, and even Fax and Printer traffic via its HP plug-in. What's more, it doesn't rely on third party applications to capture all this stuff. This far exceeds the abilities of any other product on the market.
As for customers, Cryoserver particularly favours large implementations with very long retention periods, which means the competitors' MS Win/SQL solutions run out of puff very quickly. That's why Sun made it their sole email compliance solution for Europe (see: http://uk.sun.com/sunnews/press/2005/2005-03-22.html ) and last year carried out user testing to 1,500,000 users.
As for large customers just from the last couple of months - Daimler Chrysler and Renault good enough for you?
4. Trevor Bailey
It's bizarre that compliance is so badly misunderstood and mis-sold these days that someone's actually suggesting that KVS and Ilumin are compliance products for IM!
Compliance is NOT about bundling someone else's product into your own and calling it 'compliant'; only products that do WITHIN THE APPLICATION: realtime replication, audited data capture (email, IM, fax etc), digital fingerprinting, authentication and verification come anywhere close. Cryoserver's the only one I've seen that can offer anything like the standard of proof required these days by a British court; perhaps that's why KPMG Forensic use it!
5. Gareth Evans
I know iLumin very well and I do know that iLumin handles VERY high volumes, is truely platform independant and does offer true compliance tools in (both post and pre-review mode for email).
As for Sun, well I also happen to know that the core SMIME (signing/encryption) engine within Sun is actually an OEM license from iLumin!
And finally on the customer side, I know iLumin has some very large financial clients (over 40,000 users per site) and that statistically you will find that people in financial houses send far higher volumes of messages that Renault-type firms.
6. anonymous
I disagree with the comment above; we bought Cryoserver because it was light years ahead of the product he mentions in terms of forensic compliance.
It's very important for e-discovery purposes to collect and store the data in a particular way, otherwise it gets thrown out of court. One of the best indicators of the high standard of Cryoserver was that they gave us KPMG Forensic (who have used it since 2002) as one of their reference customers!
We looked at every other product, nothing comes close.
7. John Andersen
I hope I'm writing the right source.
I need info on using IM on my PC.
How do i get started making IM possible.
Thank you for any help you can offer me.
(Ed note. For home users there are a number of free services available from the likes of MSN, Yahoo! and AOL. Though if you intend using it at work or on a shared computer/public terminal, you should check what policies are in place regarding the use of IM. We wouldn't recommend one service above the other - it also depends what services are used by the people you might want to contact as you will obviously need people on the other end of the line. You should also read the numerous articles on sites such as silicon.com about the potential pitfalls of using IM, which like any form of electronic communication can have problems with security and privacy.)