Instant messaging world

Everyone PC user has heard of Instant Messaging software or IM. Depending on your generation, you either are an avid user or your children use it. What started out as a social networking tool for adolescents on the home computer is now gaining recognition in the office environment as an alternative communication tool. Do you know all of the capabilities and risks of this casual tool? Instant Messaging use has merit - it is quick, direct and conversational - like a phone conversation, yet you can still multi-process it supports group talk - several people in one conversation or session accounts and usage is typically free via the major providers - MSN, Yahoo, AOL Since it is often not formally implemented by the company as a work tool, it is considered personal and lacks oversight. Many employers do not even have a written usage policy. IT views it as one less area to monitor and support. Here is where the problems can begin. Two factors every employer needs to consider if you opt to ig...

Mobile devices such as Cell Phone or usually called as Hand Phone not merely just a tools to make a phone call. Right now, Mobile Cell Phone is also used to make an Internet behaviority. With mobile phone we can browse our favourite site or even make a chat using our favourite Instant Messenger Service such as Yahoo Messenger. Combining Mobile Phone as Instant Messenger or Instant Message ability, we can call them as Mobile Messenger. Almost all platform IM Protocol Service can be handled by Mobile Messenger: MSN aka WLM, Jabber, GTalk, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM aka AOL Instant Messenger and many more. All we we need to have is a chat client or Instant Message Software that run in our Mobile Phone. Thus, we can make a chat from our Mobile Phone easily. Top Three Mobile Messengers Even we can use IM Mobile Messenger for each of IM Protocol, it is more easy and fast if we have a mobile messenger chat client that will work for all platform IM Protocol Network. shMessenger (WAP, Mobile) shMessenger ...

In these days there is huge gain in popularity of Instant Messenger services. In fact there is over 1 billions of messages transfer each day using instant messaging (IM). With increase in popularity, the instant messenger networks are moving towards encrypted communication from plain communication. Many of IM software send the messages as the plain text over the internet. This allows anybody to monitor your conversations. There are many tools available on the internet by which anybody can see your instant messages. Many of the users, unknowing all these security concern, communicate private/confidential information through instant messages. This gives the hacker a chance of hijack the private information which can cause the corporate disasters. Now the use of instant messengers is well accepted and encouraged in the corporate world as the formal communication as it provides a synchronize communication mechanism which is faster than email and cheaper than phones. With the use of instant...

Trend Micro is targeting e-mail, instant messaging and collaboration platform security with a suite of products that leverage its cloud-based Smart Protection Network. The suite is made up of four products: Trend Micro IM Security for Microsoft Office Communications Server, Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange, Trend Micro PortalProtect for Microsoft SharePoint and Trend Micro Control Manager. Trend Micro has bundled together some of its messaging security products to bolster enterprise defenses using its cloud-based Smart Protection Network. Dubbed Trend Micro Communication & Collaboration Security, the suite consists of four products—Trend Micro IM Security for Microsoft Office Communications Server, Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange, Trend Micro PortalProtect for Microsoft SharePoint and Trend Micro Control Manager. The suite is powered by the Smart Protection Network, Trend Micro's content security architecture. The idea is to leverage Smart Protection Netw...

Instant Messaging (IM) has emerged as of the most successful and widely deployed applications on the Internet. Unfortunately, this success has come at a heavy price, with IT attackers shifting their attention to IM, propagating IM-born viruses, worms, spam over IM (SPIM), malware and phishing. Alarmingly, despite its wide adoption and equally impressive security onslaughts, IM still remains generally unprotected in both consumer and enterprise environments, leaving it exceedingly vulnerable to attacks and exploits. Gartner experts take it one step further stating that IM has become an e-mail alternative for distributing viruses and other malware. At the same time, only 10% of organisations have formal IM policies in place, according to a 2007 Burton Group survey. And of those, only half secure the application. Many don’t even know whether employees are using IM. Looking purely from an enterprise perspective, IM poses the two key threats: it opens new vulnerabilities through which infor...

Dealing with clients often means leaving the light on for AIM, Skype and others IM. When software localisation vendor Lionbridge Technologies started rolling out Microsoft's unified communications software in 2006, it let its 4300 employees keep on using public instant messaging services such as AIM or Yahoo Messenger. Today, its Office Communications Server software handles a million IM conversations per month. That has lessened employees' use of outside IM services but hardly eliminated it, according to IT director Oyvind Kaldestad. "We are encouraging people to use Office Communicator for all internal IMing," he said. "But we are a client-driven company and some of our customers like to use Skype or GoogleTalk. So we don't lock down our employees' computers." Unified communications (UC) software such as IBM's SameTime, Cisco's Unified Personal Communicator and Microsoft's Office Communicator may offer instant messaging along with power...

* Adopt a user policy for instant messaging. Your employees need to know whether you view instant messaging as an appropriate vehicle to communicate with customers or business partners. Any policy should contain at least general guidelines for its use. -- Julie Lancaster, director of marketing, Visualware Inc., Turlock, Calif. * Integrate IM into your existing corporate directory. This is very important, as the corporate directory is the lifeblood of "who's who" in an enterprise. Requiring a third party to maintain a list of your employees creates an opportunity for a security breach. -- Brian White, senior product manager for presence and instant messaging, and Kevin McLellan, marketing manager for workplace collaboration products, IBM's Lotus Software Group, Cambridge, Mass. * Integrate your IM application with the internal personnel system as a way to securely register IM names. This is an easy way to capture identities and manage changes in users' IM s...

Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack. While the biggest actual threats to VoIP networks remain attacks to the underlying IP network infrastructure, UC opens up new angles of attack by creating connections between VoIP networks and corporate data networks. Typically, most corporate deployments these days try to segregate VoIP as much as possible, creating islands that protect the voice network by broadly restricting access for devices unnecessary to supporting calls, says Ted Ritter, an analyst with Nemertes Research. Unified communications changes all that. "With UC, by definition you are opening up your infrastructure and focusing on collaboration, reaching outside the enterprise to trading partners and customers," Ritter says. Eavesdropping, altering conversations, stealing phone access to commit toll fra...

39.5% of all Romanian employees with access to the Internet use instant messaging programs during their working hours, a poll conducted by BestJobs, answered by 1,627 people, indicates. "Most companies in Romania loss 25% of their employees' productivity because they spend time chatting with friends. As an average, employees waste at least 2 or 3 hours on the Internet", said Neogen marketing manager Constantin Ferseta, quoted by NewsIn. The recruiting specialist says that employers may put an end to this situation by banning the use of programs like Yahoo Messenger, Skype or Google Talk. Representatives of another recruiting company, Psihoselect, consider that employees who waste time "on the mess" are those who don't have enough work to do in the office. According to the specialists, this kind of conversations is not the reason why labor productivity is affected, instead the managers who allow too many hours for completing a job are to blame. On the other h...

Staying focused on work can be a challenge when clients expect to be able to contact you 24/7. Chip Camden shares his thoughts about the effectiveness and hindrances of some common ways to communicate with clients. Any IT consultant who has been through at least one failed project can tell you that accurate and timely communication with your client is one of the most important factors of success. But it’s also possible to have too much communication — or rather, too frequent. Too many interruptions, even when they’re from your client, can fragment your concentration to the point that you can’t get anything accomplished. Here’s my take on the effectiveness of communicating with clients via instant messaging (IM), phone, e-mail, wikis/blogs/Web sites, and face-to-face meetings. IM I’ve tried using IM with a couple of my clients. While it speeds up communication, the interrupt factor is too high unless you can effectively ignore it when you need to concentrate. Clients will often shoot yo...