Although instant messaging (IM) 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 nicknames the guy in sales, a.k.a. "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 PeopleSoft Inc., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., 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," explained Nate Root, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "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."

The most popular consumer platforms for chatting are America Online (AOL) Inc.'s Instant Messenger, Yahoo Inc.'s Instant Messenger, and Microsoft Corp.'s Instant Messenger (MSN). In the enterprise space, Microsoft and IBM and the top two providers of IM solutions. The former offers its SharePoint Services Collaboration platform with an IM client that integrates with its Office Suite, while IBM has its Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, formerly know as Lotus Sametime.

Throughout September and October of this year, Forrester surveyed about 1,000 companies to see what their purchasing plans were for IM in 2004. Root said 25 percent of these companies already had some sort of IM up and running, about 50 percent didn't have any plans or didn't know what the company's plans were, and the remaining 25 percent were considering purchasing or piloting an IM product in 2004. Two-thirds of these companies had annual revenues greater than US$1 billion, while the remaining 33 percent had annual revenues between $500 million to $1 billion.

"Right now it's kind of like the wild, wild west out there. The companies that are progressive are really going after (IM) and are trying to find solutions very quickly," Root said. "Eventually what should happen is the large platform vendors will come to an agreement on standards like Session Initiation Protocol or SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), and eventually get some real interoperability between the major network products."

However, it is not easy for companies to get a handle on IM, Root said. Not only is it difficult to know who is using what, but enforcing Draconian policies such as blocking ports so users can't download consumer IM apps is also very difficult. "Employees are very good at finding ways to use the collaboration tools they like," he said. "IM is very much a grassroots phenomenon and once it has started it's hard to get the cat (back) in the bag."

IBM is one example of an early adopter, but it also had

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