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Network Chat as a Tool for Corporate Communications?
rimmon asks: "I'd like to know what experience have you made with [network-enabled chatting programs] as tools to communicate with your boss, with your employees or your customers? Does your company utilize [Instant Messenger or IRC] as a communication tool (to communicate with customers, between employees and Pointy Haired Bosses?
If you use or provide [chatting systems]: Is this technology an effective tool to communicate? What are the Pros and Cons? What type of chat technology do you use and what flavor of chat (open, moderated, etc.) works best for you?"
Why are all the slashdot stories boring today?
perhaps they have been eating too many POOPNOODLES
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it's called E-Mail. All information is kept track of by a central server, all the important stuff is saved, it can be orginized into folders, works easilly across the network, and people are notified almost instantly (via. outlook) when they have a new message.
E-Mail is the answer here.
More HERE...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Instant Messaging is good, but invasive, but hey, you're at work, deal. We have a Jabber server setup, with fairly limited abilities for the average user, but some nice administrative features. Jabbers nice, it's free, and it's being continually developed.
That use Lotus for E-Mail get Sametime (and AIM-clone sans AIM features plus intranet features) bundled with it. We use it at my computer for instant messenging, which is just more convenient than e-mail for simple discussions.
Vonal Declosion
Ah, but the telephone is indeed a weapon of mass distraction.
Sorry I couldn't resist that.
I mean, come on. What ever you are doing...it just breaks your concentration and even if you don't have to asnswer it, the zone is gone. So the only real answer is to not answer, and that is no answer. I swear.
Either email me, or come over to talk to me. If it is not super time senstive, I will get it in email. If it is super time sensative, commit as much time to it as you ask me to by walking over to my desk.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Worked for a company that was radically attached to IRC (you weren't at work unless you were logged onto IRC)
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Personal opinion, IRC (and typing in general) is way to low bandwidth to hold technical conversations on... What might be solved with a 10 minute phone call takes hours to discuss over IRC (especialy with the cross chat). Upside is the whole thing was logged and you could go on a company server and look through ALL of the IRC logs, the Con to that is absolutely nobody did that
The best use I would make of IRC would be
(nick) You there Pete
(pete) Hey... did you ring nick ?
(nick) Yeah, can I call you now ?
(pete) Sure
(phone heard ringing in the background)
Frankly I will never work on another distributed team if I can help it. I want to sit close enough to my immediate co-workers that I know if I can bother them (based on the music they are playing usually) and take it from there... having people across three timezones suck
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Yeah, it's evil but it get's the job done. Setup a bunch of standard ID's and groups in a buddy list and distribute it around. It's only used for quicky communications because we are all tied to a phone headset and hard to get a hold of.
So when there's an outage, etc. we get IM'd from folks all over the country in other data centers looking for more information. It's primarly used for this purpose and we never send anything important. It's used for instant quick communications and little else.
I live in South Carolina, and I work as an admin for a school in Chicago. Since I'm part time, I don't get any perks like long-distance expenses. This makes for something of a problem when discussing thorny technical issues whether a wooden or metal cluebat would be best applied to the latest luser.
I was never one to chat much. Then I tripped across Jabber, and thought I'd give it a shot (it's an open protocol -- lots of fun to hack cool tools onto). Turns out most of my co-workers were using one or another chat system (AIM, MSN, ICQ) for their personal communication. Jabber does a wonderful job of tying all of those networks together, so I can chat with any of them. It also allows me to incorporate some nifty scripts. My favorites are server-monitoring scripts, so I can 'chat' with my servers, and they can send me a message when unusual circumstances present themselves.
For most purposes, I find it easier to chat via Jabber than to talk on the phone -- most of the things we discuss are best seen spelled out (snippets of code, hostnames, etc.).
We don't really use it all the time, but it's functional and we can keep logs for future reference.
...going to take a [stab] at the [submitter]'s use of [square brackets]?
We use Yahoo! IM a great deal. Also lots of email. Our development team is spread all around the country, with HQ in Boston, but several developers in New York, Texas, California, and (of course) India. Without such capabilities, life would really suck.
I work at a healthcare company, so we have to be pretty careful about security and privacy... but that just means that we use secure email for anything containing secuity or privacy information. IM still covers a lot of ground, though.
We've been looking into switching to an internal secure Jabber server, but we've been having a certain amount of technical difficulties actually getting it to work for everyone, and Y!IM is pretty well entrenched already.
Other technologies that we're starting to get great use out of for collberation are VNC and screen (a virtual terminal program for *n*x that allows terminal sharing) over SSH.
Hope that helps.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
On a small network I manage, I find NET SEND (with the dotNETSender GUI frontend) and Winpopup on old 9X machines is a simple solution that users easily understand. And this kind of instant messaging is good for brief comments when you don't want to be placing phone calls all over your offices, or waiting for email answers (especially when you just want to ask a short, simple question, such as "Got that file ready?"). The message pops right up on thier screen, so you know they'll notice it.
:P ), and things like AOL IM tend to be for personal use, also easily abused. I'd only use IM for restricted situations. Of course, the NET SEND option is only practical for smaller networks. If you have larger organizations, something like a Jabber server or Exchange Messaging Service is your best bet.
IM in most situations is bad, just a time waster (IRC is a huge productivity killer; almost as bad as slashdot
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Last place I worked used different channels for different things. Everyone used email. Managers and development staff used a lot of IM. And network ops tended to use chat (IRC/ICB). The IM is good when you need to get a specific person, the chat programs are good when you need (e.g.) to talk to whoever's on duty now. Email can do either (if you set up lists and such), but is slower (but more reliable). Basically, I think it all depends on what you're doing.
Email is of course the traditional business tool and works well enough. Technically savvy users can shunt all messages with the word 'Pfizer' or 'Novartis' or 'IBM' into folders according to job and have a forensic record of everything that was said via email.
;)
But the technical sophistication of any group of business users is likely to be too low to do anything more to hit 'send'. What I like about this site is how conversations sort of evolve organically and the cream of the discussions have a tendency (note: I did not say absolutely that they always do) rise to the top. (Okay, so I may be in the minority in that opinion
So, my question is, what about using Slash as a business tool? Say that the tech dept (yo soy un capitano, aqui) sets up a linux box running slash, mySql, PHP, Apache and sets up a page where folks could blog about the "work" that they are doing? With headlines reading, instead of things like "Linus to star in toothpaste commercial", it could have "stories" representing "Pfizer Job#2071" and the like? Managers would then moderate the discussions? I thought of this while at a company retreat where we were discussing different information processing techniques.
And yes, business users may not be that technically savvy, but browing at -1 would be enough to convince one it doesn't take much mental "juice" to blog (or moderate for that matter). It's a weird idea, but I wonder if it might have potential?
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
A lot of winodows accounting packages - Peachtree, MAS 90, Quickbooks that use files as a psudo-database crash *HARD* if you don't turn off opplocks. You can do it in both Windows Server and Samba.
(Opplocks is windows crapy way of caching networked files for speed - it's implementation sucks)
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Then we actually ran a MUD for a little while on the theory that it could always be running and somebody would always be around to talk to. But the old timers kept killing the interns.
I tried setting up a Jabber server but this was right at the time when AOL was deliberately blocking the plugin so nobody wanted to use it.
The problem we had with the standard IMs was that nobody wanted to give up their own client, so you had half Yahoo and half AIM (screw MSN). But the other problem was the impossibility of getting an accurate buddy list, since everybody got to pic their own name.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
SameTime is by far the best IM I've use (especially in a corporate setting). It supports neat things like conferences, encryption, and various broadcasts. We have a number of clients (internally at least) for SameTime that tie into our LDAP directory.
SameTime is awesome.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
We have seven computers in our house, a couple are Linux boxes, two are XP, and the others are 98/98SE. We all share a broadband connection via a LAN. What I'd like to do is set up a chat program that is only accessible from/to the other computers on the network. No one on the Internet should be able to IM in, and no one on the LAN should be able to IM out, but we should all be able to IM each other. We often work with sensitive data (credit-cards, SSN's, etc.) that I would prefer we not have to send outside the local network. Since numbers are far easier to share via text than over a phone/voice system, a secure IM system like this would be favourite. I am not against everyone using AIM, Yahoo, IRC etc. ont he side, but for sharing personal information, I need a more secure option than sending packets over the Internet. Encryption for just-in-case would also be a welcome addition. Any options, or am I pissing into the wind?
When I was interning at IBM we used a system called Sametime. It was compatible with AIM clients, but when talking to other Sametime clients it was encrypted, secure and logged. It proved a great time saver because the response/turnaround time was much lower than e-mail, but it was still less intrusive than phone calls. Not to mention you could tell at a glance the status of your co-workers. I've sorely missed this tool when working in other environments.
but the company i work for uses pagers. Someone wants to talk to you, they page, you get to the nearest phone and hit #, then your number, and your connected to them, if you dont respond after so long you go to voicemail. You can also email someones pager. cost effective? eh. an excellent tool to use? oh yes
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
Internally we use Sonork. It's pretty good, keeps logs and integrates with other windows apps. It allows you to conference as well as normal 1 to 1 chat. It's also nice and secure.
Check it out
www.sonork.com
I want to use these Mod points but I can't find anything Interesting, Informative or Insightful on Slashdot.
- adam
At my section (technical support for a J2EE product), we are using YahooMessenger with good results.
:-), I can feed suggestions without waiting for them to type.
We have several tiers (frontline vs backline) and a frontline person may ask for help from backline while still talking to the customer on the phone. And as I can even hear them talking
It is also good for asking opinions on a case (by sending a case number), for sending URLs and for backreference (for those who enable history). For me as a backline specifically, it allows to multiplex multiple conversations and/or something else I am doing at the same time.
Finally, as it allows to discuss simple issues quietly, it does not disturb other people. Of course, if the issue is complex, we would usually resort to talking (f2f) anyway, but even that is shortened by the preliminary chat.
The negatives are mostly those of the YM program itself. Some of them (auto float) were fixed, some are still there. I have tried other programs however (trillian, etc) and came back to YM.
P.s. Something I should probably not mention is that we also have some people with not very strong speaking English. They are however easily understandable in chats due to the technical nature of the issues.
I guess it depends on what kind of work you're doing. When I'm working on a programming assignment for school, I would rather not have a phone ringing. At the manufacturing company I work (as an accounting intern), most people don't really have to do much work that requires long stretches of concentration, and people are constantly calling each other and paging each other over the P.A. system. It works very well for us. A computer-based form of real-time communciation wouldn't be practical anyway, since not everyone has a computer and most of the engineers and supervisors are rarely at their desks anyway.
What about running an NNTP server internally? It'd let people reply to others. You'd have threads showing all contact. It could be made available to remote locations, branch offices, etc.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I think it's called Microsoft Messenger (people are always getting it confused with MSN messenger, maybe because it's the same UI). I'd say that within an company IM provides another option to get a hold of people. For me, it's probably proven most useful when trying to get a quick but non-urgent reply from folks who get loads of email. All IM messages are from inside the company, so it effectively cuts in line in front of the spam and other email.
All of the developers in my group have MSDN subscriptions, which means we all have .NET Passports, which means we have MSN Messenger accounts. It comes preinstalled on XP Pro, of course, but I've turned most of my group on to Trillian--which (if you don't know) speaks AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and IRC as well as MSN, all at the same time.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
We're mainly using MSN and Exchange IM: main benefits are presence info - although it's not 100% accurate, it's really useful to know if somebody's likely to be at their desk.
Biggest plus for IM itself seems to be the ability to establish a new channel of communication while on the phone e.g. during a boring conference call (lots of those!) or while on the phone to a customer, without having to put them on hold. Also e.g. for PAs using IM to pass short messages to their boss while the boss is on the phone.
Less importantly are the ability to share small bits of text very quickly (e.g. it's quicker to pass a long URL to a colleague at the next desk via IM than via email), and the ability to launch voice chat and desktop sharing quickly and simply - the MSN IM implementation is far more immediate and accessible for users than NetMeeting.
Downside, if you think of it as being a downside, particulary using a public service such as MSN is the amount of private trivia conversations ("have you had your lunch yet, honey?").
Has anybody experience with (moderated) chats as a tool to communicate on special occasions between bosses and employees?
For example to communicate important changes and news concerning the business. Using chats it would be easy to get a fast feedback on how changes are accepted throughout the company.
p.s.: I'm the poster and I didn't use these [] brackets...
We use it a lot when our Exchange server goes down.
The company I work for uses both an Im system (msn messenger over exchange) and an IRC server for different groups of users. We are a non IT company with small IT groups scattered over many sites. The IRC channel is used primarily for our help desk to make quick announcements, and to notify one another of issues.
We use the Im for individual, and quick communications that need to be read immediately. Just because someone gets a notice that they have new email, there is no guarantee that they will stop what they are doing to read it. (I know I don't), so for a quick and important message (Like I'm rebooting server xxx NOW) messager works great.
for those situations where we need more info we use (in addition to the phone) a VC system made up of some moderately high end web cams.
All in all it might be slight overkill, but we get the job done, using free or cheap software and it's all quick and efficient.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
At my last company we had a development team, half at the client site and half at our office. Since in neither case we had direct lines, we used YM quite effectively to ask quick questions. It also allowed us to pass source code files back and forth, since we did not have an internet based source code control system. It was definitely fast for quick questions that did not need a phone call.
I was trying to get some work done with my group over IM in the lab - but the admin made me close it and told me that the lab isn't for chatting. I tried to argue but he threatened to kick me out. It's okay though, 'cause he was wearing a penguin shirt, even though none of the computers run a linux distro.
I'm glad I payed $4000 tuition this summer to not be able to get my work done. It's great. Really.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
We set up an IRC server (Unreal) on a server behind our firewall. Remote staff tunnel in via a variety of methods and connect to it. We have dedicated channels for actual conferences (general staff, development, management), and we use IRC's direct user-to-user chat to hold individual one-on-one chats.
It works extremely well for quick and easy questions and answers around the world. Longer stuff we usually handle by phone conferences, but IRC cuts down on our phone bill alot, and is a less-intrusive way to handle quick stuff.
We still e-mail a lot of course.
Also, depending on the tunneling method (VPN or SHH) the IRC direct file transfer method may or may not work between users.
We frequently use Trillian as a client, as it's easy and slick, has a contact list, and logs your chats locally. It also can be used to communicate via other mediums than just our IRC setup, so you don't have to run a dozen IM apps on each machine.
I work for a middle sized company...about 300 employee's I'd say, but only around 70 of them have computers. I run a Jabber server on an old Proliant with a Pentium Pro 200 mhz at work, and Rival V3 (Freeware, not open) on the Windows 2000 clients. The users know that it's just for instant stuff that doesn't need to be archived, and that they can be read by anyone. The condition to implement was that we could take a look from time to time to see what people are chatting about... We very rarely see personnal stuff, it's more like "Check order #12345 please", and the personnal stuff doesn't account for more than general water cooler chit chat, phone, etc. Overall, it saved long distance calls between Montreal, Toronto, South Carolina, took maybe a day to setup + another day to get clients up, give a lil' bit of training, all running on an old POS server, and it's definitely been worth it.
I am sometimes called upon to negotiate with IT suppliers as part of my job. I am part of a scattered team: 7 of us located in 6 cities on 3 continents.
In the old days (i.e., before Instant Messaging), our negotiation team needed to fly to a common location in order to negotiate with a supplier. This was necessary so that we could stay in touch with one another during the negotiation.
Now, we all get on a telephone conference bridge with the supplier's team, and then we start up an IM conference that only our team uses. This allows us to stay in touch in real time during the negotiation; but, we don't have to travel the world and sit together (at great financial expense). Generally, one of us leads a particular section of the negotiation, and the others all feed him/her with input while he/she negotiates.
The odd time we do a face-to-face negotiation, we still an the IM conference, since it is a less obtrusive method of "passing notes" during the negotiation. We all have laptops and take notes on them during a negotiation, so our computers are in the room with us anyway.
Instant Messaging has improved our ability to get work done while lowering the cost of doing the work.
We use Yahoo! IM and MSN Messenger here, with Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux clients. It's quite handy when a tech is in a computer lab in a school without a phone, but needs to contact another tech for help. Sure beats e-mail for hands-on help.
Would be nice to setup a Jabber server to start hosting the IM service ourselves. That way we wouldn't have to worry about possibly sensitive info passing across the Internet, we could keep it all within our WAN, and possibly even encrypt it.
a dot-commin', ASP-writin' cubicle dweller, I worked in an old warehouse where most of the time, the person you needed to talk to was in a different part of the building.
We used ICQ, sometimes quite a bit. I preferred it to people calling me about something that required a very short answer, especially while I was trying to get a website cranked out. It was also helpful to have ICQ mark you as away when your screensaver kicked in... that way, people know you're not at your desk. Or mark yourself as busy.
The main drawbacks we ran into: if for some reason our ICQ clients couldn't reach the main ICQ server, it wasn't much use. And, people would IM me, email me to ask why I wasn't answering ICQ, then call, then interrupt me at my desk. There's such a thing as being too accessible. Everyone has to buy into the idea of using IM *instead of* other more interrupting ways to talk to you.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Where I work, we use a combination of AIM and Y!M. Most people use AIM (though I'm slowly converting people to Trillian...) for day to day stuff. However, since we often have conference calls between our various offices, it's great to have video conferencing; the 'remote' offices especially like it. Y!M is ok, it allows video chat between many parties at the same time. However, it only updates 1 frame a second, so it sucks in that way.
Does anyone have a better solution?
Thanks.
Todd
-- !todd erases a red dot! I steal music on the internet.
A few of my clients who have completed OS X migrations use iChat with Rendezvous, for a nice, setup-free buddy list, and they love it. No more picking up the phone or hollering over cubicle walls for quick questions. Exchanging files with people is now much easier, they don't even have to bother with e-mail or dropping them on the server... just drag the file onto the intended recipient's name and drop it. Now with the video conferencing, some are prepared to use that and save themselves long (like, 10 minutes from point A to point B without leaving the building) walks back and forth between two departments.
The reactions people have gotten when we've demoed iChat for them are priceless.
~Philly
Well, all this talk: email, chat, chat, email, ...
...and many more (such as file sharing).
How about BOTH in one software. Our company is using CryptoHeaven. It has both chat and email
Also, how about security?
I would stongly recommend CryptoHeaven cause they use a very strong encryption so you can feel safe.
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