IM Emerges From the Shadows

Although instant messaging can be a convenient way to communicate at work, just as often it seems to end up as a comedy of errors: misinterpretations of tone, sending a personal message to the wrong contact, and putting up with the terrible nickname the guy in sales, aka "Sultan_of_Sales," feels compelled to use.

While it's no secret that IM has been criticized for being intrusive, an increasing number of companies, including IBM, PeopleSoft, and Sun Microsystems, are starting to rely on IM for business communications and have standardized on a particular application in the process. Others have only started to think about where IM could fit into their organization, or support limited use of IM through free download clients.

"IM by and large to date has been a consumer phenomenon," explains Nate Root, senior analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It has been something that people have adopted to chat with their friends and their relatives and it's something that has been accidentally co-opted for use within companies."

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