IM Usage & Awareness Services

CowboyRobot writes "Queue has two related articles on Instant Messaging. The first, written by two Sun Labs researchers, looks at the lack of standards in IM protocols, as well as the preception that the distracting nature of IM precludes it from being a more useful communications medium. Their solutions involve new 'Awareness Services' and they summarize three research prototypes: 'Awarenex', 'Rhythm Awareness', and 'Lilsys'. The second includes the results of an AT&T Labs study of IM use. Among the findings, "Despite the perception that IM is commonly used for social purposes in the workplace, we found that was rarely the case. Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.""

Comments

So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[iantri]

I know people said the same thing about e-mail, but what good does IM do in the office?

Furthermore, what about the security issues.. people are going to want to bring in their own copy of AIM/Y!/MSN Messenger to chat with friends.. doesn't this pose a security risk?

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Anonymous Coward]

It allows people to talk to each other without turning away from their screens, increasing productivity!
Security-wise, you'd have IM only allowed internally (all external connection attempts blocked) on a work-supllied version of whatever you're using.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[marc_gerges]

Been heavily involved in a huge IT project. It ran purely on IM.

IM is just invaluable when you deal with dozens or hundreds of people in a handful of time zones, many of them travelling around, often no phones around... there's nothing as useful as dropping a message and get near instant return on your question.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[AchmedHabib]

I have co-workers who are located in different buildings. So IM is great here. You can see if people are at their desk. it's somewhere in between a phone call and a email. Like whats that perl script you've got running on server X, it's eating up all resources! I just talk to them on IM instead of calling. but I can't wait for them to answer the email. and when you DO need to call somone, I always check IM first to see if they are at their PC.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[realfake]

I work for a medium-sized content website; IM has become pretty deeply ingrained in the way people communicate around here. One good example: we use it to coordinate making new areas of the site live; the content people can sit at their own desks and launch content using our CMS, we can sit at our own desks to move code from the development server to the live server. And we QA as we go (we don't have a formal QA team). I can't imagine being able to coordinate this process so well in any other medium.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[chipster]

I thought the same thing at first...but it actually does lots of good.

Our CIO made a certain IM client standard throughout the company, and all tech folks are *required* to have an IM account.

We find ourselves using it more often than not. For example, our HQ is in CA, and our Data Center is in MN. Instant messenging comes in handy while working on remote projects, troubleshooting, etc. We have a *ton* of remote offices with folks in them.

I don't know about you, but I am not much of a "phone person", and I find IM to be somewhat of a "happy medium" between phone and email.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot less spam with IM.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[CaptainBaz]

Um, how is text chat a security risk? A productivity risk, maybe, but security? Sure, someone could use it to send classified info to a friend outside the company. But they don't need IM to do this. People talk in pubs, on the phone, by email, hell I could just shout secrets out of my office window :-)

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[gl4ss]

little less formal, so people use it more willingly. of course this is just an attitude question, but that's how it is though. also if there's channels other people can learn from others problems, or interfere with the chat if there's something they know about the issue(same with mailinglists though, so again it's just an attitude/formalness question). it's more handy for quick oneliners than email is as well, if you need the answer quick(and especially if it's totally meaningless unless you get the answer quick).

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record Sun Microsystems has their own Instant Messaging product. And internally, they use a mix of their own messaging product and Jabber. A necessity as many engineers in the company work remotely or from home as reported by an earlier Slashdot story (approximately 13,000 employees working remote).

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mwood]

I remain unconvinced. Much of what people want me to do is not U R G E N T but can wait until I take care of it. The truly urgent stuff that happens maybe three times a year can be handled by phone.

Send me an email. If I'm at my desk, tkbiff makes a noise and I'll probably deal with it immediately; if I'm away from my desk you won't get much from me until I return anyway.

I remember IM from the days of PLATO. (Anybody here old enough to remember PLATO?) My first two thoughts were, "wow, neato!" and "but what would I actually do with it?" There was some DECnet chat thingy that I played with for a few minutes, which pretty much confirmed my opinion of chat thingies even before DEC took it out. Before that it was possible to link terminals on TOPS-20 and communicate by typing Exec comments to each other, and wow wasn't that less rewarding than expected.

Some of us work best asynchronously. Put some work in my queue and it'll get done. Distract me with IM and I'll turn the IM gadget off.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[KingRoo]

Great for heavy-duty teleconferences too; we have our team on IM (no doubt the others do as well), and we can quickly coordinate responses, point to relevant docs, whine about the nitwit droning on, etc.....

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mwood]

Time zones, eh? So, the guy in Delhi IMs me, but I'm at home asleep. Huh -- no answer. If he'd emailed me I'd have seen it next morning and fired off an answer for him to read when *he* wakes up.

What I wouldn't have given, years ago, to be able to email that development group in Australia instead of waiting for the time when I might find someone by the phone!

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[cerberusss]

You didn't read this part:

IM is just invaluable when you deal with dozens or hundreds of people in a handful of time zones

Right now I'm doing a project where part of the team is offshore in India. We couldn't really miss IM.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[sceptre1067]

One other thing to add... it has a sort of privacy... Email is stored, phone conversations can be overheard, so if one is interested in sensitive gossip (e.g. who's getting laid off and when) IM is perfect. Nobody talks out loud, easy to hide, and since you're typing away, you look like you're working.

Only danger is somebody looking over your sholder, and that is easy to take care of.

Also it's 'quiet'. In work enviroments where people can be pushed pretty close toghether (e.g. 2 to 3 people sharing a cube) typing becomes background noise and is less distracting then phone and hallway conversations.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[DarthTaco]

If you don't like it, don't use it... and you don't. So why complain to slashdot about it?

IM is more interactive than e-mail, but not as resource demanding as using a phone. I mean, I can talk to someone on a phone and work if I'm talking about what I'm working on. But if I'm talking to my wife, the keyboard stops.

Now with IM, I can go back and forth quite easily and smoothly. If I am chatting with my wife on IM, the keyboard doesn't have to stop. If I don't reply in a minute or two, people get the idea that I'm busy.

With e-mail, if I don't reply in a minute or two, that doesn't mean squat. The message might be delayed, I might have closed my e-mail client, or any number of things. People don't expect a prompt repsonse from an e-mail.

If you think IM is somehow distracting, how can you handle a telephone ring?

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[pavon]

Looking at your post I noticed one major difference between it and the parent. All of your examples related to people tasking you with things to do. His post had to do with back and forth discussions between peers. That is the critical difference. I could imagine that if the only reason that people contacted me was to give me more work, IM would be very annoying. That is what ticket queues were created for (and email also works fine for smaller uses, where the 'customers' only have one person to contact to get their problem fixed).

However, when working on team development projects, having IM open to discuss things with the other developers while we are working saves a ton of time. It is much faster than walking down to their office and back, more interactive than email, and in all the settings I've seen it is less intrusive than a telephone call or office visit, as it is not considered rude to ignore the IM window until you've finished the task at hand.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Kick the Donkey]

No more a productivity risk than having Slashdot available at work...

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[technomom]

Also, it fits a nice niche between the immediacy of the telephone and the text accuracy of email.

IM is very handy for help desk type of support where you need to direct a user to a web site. Much easier to IM a URL than it is to clearly enunciate Double-u Double-u Double-u dot whatever dot com slash tilde unpronounceable dot H T M L.

JoAnn

JoAnn

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mlilback]

I remain unconvinced. ....Send me an email.

Maybe that works for you. I check email twice a day and I never answer the phone, so neither of those are options for quickly contacting me. If a coworker needs to ask a question, IM works best. Especially when I'm working from home.

For example, if someone wants me to come into their office to show me something or to join a meeting, they IM me. Email is not a solution for that kind of need.

Plus, it works great for my clients. If they notice a problem with their website, they IM so I can immediately take a look at it. Same thing happens when someone doesn't have the database privileges they need. They IM, and I grant them the privileges. They can get back to work immediately.

I also know that the Wall Street Journal Online uses IM extensively between their U.S. and Europe offices. Editors at both locations will be working on the website and use it to make sure two people aren't working on the same story that just came over the wire. They used to run up huge phone bills between the offices but that all disappeared with IM.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mwood]

I've trained people to ask themselves whether something is really urgent enough to justify the cost of phoning me. They usually pick email.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Afrosheen]

Yeah, but 'thank you, come again' isn't nearly as funny in text as it is in person.

*quickie mart simpsons reference for the 3 of you that have mod points and didn't get it.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Anonymous Coward]

IM isn't for urgent communication, it's for near-urgent.

You use it for things more urgent than e-mail, but less urgent than phone calls.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mwood]

Okay, different people work in different ways, so it's reasonable to *provide* IM for those who take to it, but not reasonable to *mandate* IM except in very special circumstances. I'm so unlike the normal IM fan that I'd probably write a special client which would batch up all the messages and email them to me twice a day, if I were required to run one and I got more than a tiny trickle of messages. People would soon learn that it really works better to email me.

The distinction trickles down to individuals, too. If you know you're working with a curmudgeon like me, send email; if you know your correspondent prefers IM, use IM. I can see a need for an addressbook field storing the recipient's preferred mode, so I don't have to remember who loves IM and who hates it. (With a really nice office equipment setup, it could even dial the phone for you, if the other guy works in phone mode, and tell you to pick up and wait.)

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Wolfrider]

> Only danger is somebody looking over your sholder, and that is easy to take care of.

--Yep, I've found that a GOOD SHARP JAB IN THE EYE often discourages snoopers. :b

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Eraser_]

Cheaper than a phone call too. A few bytes (1K?) worth of an IM must be cheaper than the same zillion 1 minute phone calls, long distance, to say "server X could use a kick in the rear" "monitoring shows it fine" "X service is lagging" "ok ill check it".

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[soft_guy]

One really good use is when you are coding something and there is someone else in the code base (or others in the codebase), you can IM them and coordinate efforts. For example, you want to ask Sam if he's made modifications to foo.cpp. Or, you want to ask him about some code in foo.cpp. You can copy it into the IM real fast. and talk together about the code snippet. Another example, is you can often send files through IM which is real useful.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that IM is finally getting the attention it deserves in the corporate world.

I wrote a research paper last year examining the basic issues of IM in the workplace.

Big takeaway: Managers and employees have profoundly different interpretations of how/why IM should be implemented at work. If you want, read the paper here.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[badmonkey]

Don't count on that. There are products to allow companies to snoop on IM conversations at the firewall.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[werfele]

I'm also old enough to remember Plato, and I also am irritated when people IM me with matters that don't really require immediate attention. Do you suppose there's any connection?

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Rudisaurus]

Right now I'm doing a project where part of the team is offshore in India. We couldn't really miss IM.

Huh??? I'm mystified; do you mean you wouldn't really miss IM, or do you mean you couldn't do without IM?

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Minna Kirai]

Sure, someone could use it to send classified info to a friend outside the company. But they don't need IM to do this.

The usual IM programs found installed on normal desktops are significantly less secure than a phone call, and even somewhat worse than a normal email.

Two people in the same office building, who send sensitive data over IM, will not expect it to go out to aol.com and back!

Corporate-targeted, security-concious IM apps can eliminate those problems.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Lemmy Caution]

If the alternative to IM is setting up two meetings a day for back-and-forth Q&A, does IM sound still sound so bad?

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mwood]

There could be a connection. We're old enough to remember when interactive computing was the exception rather than the rule, and we had to learn how to keep the pipes full of work (and the advantages of organizing some kinds of work that way). Today it's hard to get a lot of newer developers/maintainers to even believe that there's a reason to think about noninteractive use of any given tool. I sometimes wonder how they develop the powers of concentration needed to think about large software projects.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mattsucks]

I see your bid, and raise you one:

Its a pain in the ass to cut-and-paste a script name, path, directory, etc from a phone conversation. Its a piece of cake from an IM session.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Mandrake]

sounds more like you don't deal well with people than you don't see the use for IM.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[sartin]

Most of what we do isn't urgent, but interactivity isn't just for urgency. Not everyone uses email interactively, that's mostly a techie thing. Pretty much everyone who uses IM uses it interactively. An email works great when I'm communicating something that is completely specified with little ambiguity. An IM allows immediate interaction if the person is present. The person I'm IMing with can ask clarifying questions, or they can look at the problem and toss up a sketch of a solution and ask if it's OK. I can then give immediate feedback. This can happen with email, but it can be a much longer cycle time.

My boss processes email 2-3 times per day. If she's on IM, I can grab her attention for 10 seconds and get the answer now. If I send the email, it could take 3-4 hours (or sometimes days) to get a response. The ability to email her for status and low interaction stuff and use IM for quick turnaround (not necessarily urgent, but interactive) communication is valuable.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[Fluid Truth]

I used it to communicate with a client who is deaf on a project that lasted about a year and a half. Very convenient. Granted, it might not have been that secure, but we weren't chatting about anything sensitive. (We were designing some custom interfaces.)

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[lvdrproject]

You can stay connected to messenger servers, you know. You can wake up to an IM just as easily as you can an e-mail.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[cerberusss]

Whoopsie, foreigner is speaking... we couldn't do without IM. Quick messages like 'are they busy with this database table' or 'it doesn't compile, this is the errormsg' is great through IM.

Re:So what exactly is it good for in the office?

[mwood]

"You can wake up to an IM just as easily as you can an e-mail."

Sure. But then it's just email with added expectations of urgency. If you know you're going to have to wait for an answer, why not email it in the first place?

See? IM doesn't work the way I want it to when I'm there, and it doesn't work the way the other guy wants it to when I'm not there. IM is the wrong way to communicate with me, always.

But then, I'd also like to be able to call someone's answering machine *by choice*, without making the phone ring, so that I can drop off a message to be heard at leisure. Obviously I must be crazy. :-)

how was this legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without
the other parties consent?

Re:how was this legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

When your on their dime you have no rights.

Re:how was this legal?

[rking]

The people were probably aware that their conversations (on company time) were being recorded and potentially monitored. That might cause you to doubt the accuracy of the results as people knowing they were being monitored might act differently to normal but it seems as though the conversations were over the period of more than a year, not just collected for the purpose of the study so they probably were using it just the way anyone would in the workplace.

Re:how was this legal?

[mirko]

it depends on your location : in Europe this is unthinkable (except in England).

Re:how was this legal?

[anthony_dipierro]

Didn't you get the memo?

Re:how was this legal?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

isn't this monitoring thing a good reason to learn a foreign language? As soon as you and your fellow office dwellers learned Swahili, there will be no more trouble with them monitoring any kind of communication.

Re:how was this legal?

[sacherjj]

hattay is hyway I earnedlay igpay atinlay.

Re:how was this legal?

[TheMidget]

in Europe this is unthinkable (except in England).

England is not part of Europe. It is part of the "coalition of willing" and instead of the Euro, it still has "funny" money.

Re:how was this legal?

[Moonshadow]

Or, you can use something like Trillian, which has transparent encryption built in. Of course, both parties need to be using encryption-aware clients, but it's a bit easier than learning a new language.

Re:how was this legal?

[walendo]

I was part of the Hubbub team. (Hubbub is the IM client used in the Isaacs study). The second step in the registration process clearly states, in bold, the following:

PLEASE NOTE: All Hubbub conversations are logged and may be used to help us improve Hubbub and to study instant messaging behavior for research purposes. If any logs are ever shared with people outside the Hubbub team, all names will be changed so that your identiy cannot be determined.

You can still sign up for a Hubbub account and see it for yourself. www.hubbubme.com.

Note, it's not being supported any more. It runs on Win2K fine, but more recent XP service packs have broken it.

Re:how was this legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

England is not part of Europe. It is part of the "coalition of willing" and instead of the Euro, it still has "funny" money.

If Sterling is "funny money" then what do you call the Euro? It's barely worth more than the US dollar.

I find that 99% of my IM time is non-work related

[ObviousGuy]

Mostly it's trying to round up a posse to go eat lunch or sending little I (heart) U messages to the cute intern.

Sometimes I play Hexic with the wife who is at home.

But in the 1% that is actually relevant to my job, it's usually some pretty serious stuff.

IM in the workplace

[Lord Bitman]

couldnt get anything done without it. Phones are much more distracting- you need to interrupt whatever you're doing for the duration of the conversation, whereas IM can be responded to whenever a free moment is had. It has a sense of urgency to it which Email does not- when you send an e-mail, you can't be sure that anyone will even respond.

As for turning around and talking to the person who's, after all, sitting right next to me anyway.. that can never lead to anything good.

Re:IM in the workplace

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very true. Since getting everyone at my workplace to use IM, the phone bills have been cut by around half. We hardly make any site to site phone calls any more compared to what we used to do.

Re:IM in the workplace

[Greyfox]

I noticed that it was also quite handy for leaving a message with someone too. Voicemail has a bit of a lag to it, but if someone's away you can pop a message up on their machine for when they come back and they see that the moment they sit down. Not to mention you can speculate about the manager's drug habits and sexual preferences in relation to dead goats with that team mate in another state during those obnoxious conference calls.

Re:IM in the workplace

[fruey]

It has a sense of urgency to it which Email does not- when you send an e-mail, you can't be sure that anyone will even respond.

Precisely. People don't respond to email. That's where IM has the advantage - you KNOW when people are online (and willing to be seen as online), and therefore they actually have to have an excuse as to why they don't reply.

Spam, poor email strategy in the workplace, lack of tracking, problems with the traces email leave... all mean that IM works in a completely different paradigm than email, and I personally find it very useful in the workplace.

Wow!

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

"Despite the perception that IM is commonly used for social purposes in the workplace, we found that was rarely the case. Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal."

Wow... that's pretty surprising. I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

Meanwhile, from the first article:

"That is, beyond the instant text-chat capability and sense of presence among online colleagues that IM provides, what other cues of activity should collaborators share to help coordinate their work? When a person you want to contact is not present, what information can the system provide to help you coordinate contact in the future? Even when you are physically present, can the system provide cues for when you are mentally receptive, or 'available,' to being interrupted?"

Don't most (if not all) IM clients do that already with their status alerts and away messages? If you ask me, "awareness services" sounds like just another new buzzword for an old idea...

Re:Wow!

[sql*kitten]

I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

Round here, we often use IM as a means to communicate hard-to-say items while on the phone - shell commands, lines from .ini files, SQL queries, code snippets. Another good use is to check if it's a convenient time to phone. Another is to leave time-sensitive notes "it will be ready in 5 minutes". Or to leave notes for people "so and so called" since everything is timestamped.

Basically, IM is ultra-lightweight email, and once you're used to it, it's a great time saver. Now we just use email for things that are expected to persist or for things that need to be refined before being sent.

Re:Wow!

[pubjames]

Wow... that's pretty surprising. I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

Don't you have to communicate with other people where you work?

Re:Wow!

[RLiegh]

Don't you have to communicate with other people where you work?

Nope. I'm a mortician.

Re:Wow!

[Digital11]

Wow... that's pretty surprising. I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

Personally while I do use AIM for some personal reasons at work, the sole reason I installed it in the first place is work related.

I'm a programmer (mostly ASP.NET with a winforms project here and there) for a bank and while there are a handful of other developers scattered throughout various departments they're not very high-level concept wise and only a couple of them have even started to scratch the surface of .NET.

That being said, when I get stuck on a bug or design issue or something there's no one I work with who can really assist. I'm not saying this to sound arrogant or because I'm full of myself... Its just that the things I do on a daily basis are things they have zero experience with or knowledge about. So when I need assistance with something I have 3 options:

1.) MSDN managed newsgroups.
2.) Use one of my 4 available freebie MS developer support incidents that comes with my MSDN Universal subscription.
3.) Get ahold of one of the 3 people I know online that are on the same level.

My first choice is always option 3 for the simple fact that if they're able to help then I've just saved myself hours, if not days. Unless a non-MS person answers the newsgroup post it usually takes 1-2 days to get a response, and usually it takes 2 or 3 responses to reach a solution. Phone support incidents are quite a bit faster but I'm trying to be sparing with those because for some reason, banks don't like to spend money and buying additional incidents isn't cheap. :P

In my mind the time I save by getting a solution from friends online more than makes up for the few minutes of productivity here and there that may be lost by chatting.

Unfortunately for me though, the bank doesn't feel the same way so I'll be removing AIM very soon as they're getting ready to deploy a big-brother type monitoring system to every pc. Joy.

/me puts on anti-flame suit for mentioning .NET in any sort of positive light..

Re:Wow!

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

"Don't you have to communicate with other people where you work?"

Not if I can help it. ;)

Re:Wow!

[Dirtside]

I'm a programmer for neopets.com, and we (the programmers, artists, monitors, and even some of the manager and executive types) all use AIM (although most of the other programmers use Trillian and I use gaim). Mostly I talk to the other programmers and friends outside the office (as well as my wife, when she's online). Aside from misc. personal chat and bitching about employees we don't like, we use IM for sending URLs to each other, bits of code, pathnames, other misc. data that's easier typed than said, as well as discussing work issues. Most of us programmers have our headphones on all the time, so we can have conversations without having to yap out loud.

IM has *plenty* of non-personal uses, and I'd say that at least half of my IMs at work are work-related. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what I'm doing and who's around, or how much work I have to do.

Re:Wow!

[Trejkaz]

Wow... that's pretty surprising. I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.

1. "Hey, you just broke the build, fix it NOW."

2. "Check your goddamned email, you slacker."

And of course my personal favourite serious use, which is using it to determine whether a user is present in the office before wasting time travelling in the elevator to find out.

AOL and others trying to market IM

[pvt_medic]

There is a growing momentum though for corporate versions of IM software. While I know AOL is not the only one, it is a quick and easy example. AOL has info about its corporate IM service. With a overview of what they offer here.

Email is the only way to go

[ObviousGuy]

Since email is typically just stashed on a server somewhere, information and knowledge can accumulate for years before some nosy IT monkey decides to cap off everyone's mailbox limit.

IM, it seems to me, just doesn't have the permanency and longevity that email does.

Re:Email is the only way to go

[FauxPasIII]

> IM, it seems to me, just doesn't have the
> permanency and longevity that email does.

Enable logging.

Re:Email is the only way to go

[gl4ss]

enable logging..

and also because of this feeling(that it doesn't get archived for years, which it just might anyways) people use it differently than they use email, they don't hesitate so much to say something or spend so much time thinking how to put it. less wasted time for really simple messages, and better for realtime discussion than sending emails back and forth.

Re:Email is the only way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Enable logging.

Re:Email is the only way to go

[AbbyNormal]

Most IM programs have the ability to log chats to a specific directory. I believe Trillian does it by default for each user you IM.
I have found myself going back to those logs frequently when discussing coding projects.

If you need to maintain a backup, burn the old logs to a cd or just log the messages to a backed up file server.

Re:Email is the only way to go

[poot_rootbeer]

IM, it seems to me, just doesn't have the permanency and longevity that email does.

This is a Good Thing -- I'd reckon that 95% or more of business correspondence (including email, memos, IM, voicemail, etc.) is ephemeral and has no informative value after it's been received.

More data != more information != more knowledge.

Re:I find that 99% of my IM time is non-work relat

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful messaging the cute intern with stuff like that .. he might sue for sexual harassment.

Best Work Tool Ever

[fuzzybunny]

I had an 18 month project at a major international investment bank, helping them put together their firewall/network security team.

They had a purely internal IRC backbone; officially, the company used Interchange chat (piece of crap), but at the time, all IRC clients could connect. I found this to be the most amazing productivity tool I've ever seen.

A web page allowed "registration" of channels and bots, although generally all the usual IRC flexibility was kept (dynamic channel creation, 1-1 chat, etc.) Users' workstation logins were automatically used as chat logins by the IC clients; their only other real additional use was quick file uploads, which generated a link from the channel bot (assuming there was one) that was posted to the whole channel.

Loads of people got in touch with us that way, to ask us about architecture or production question; it was great, as it took away the slowness, asynchronous nature ("me too!") and fear of leaving a paper trail (hence formality) of email, and allowed far better conferencing with larger groups of people than the phone. I've noticed that people also tend to be more succinct and able to express themselves in quick bursts of text--if there was any problem, you could always pick up the phone on the side.

The thing was also good for quickly sending (DCC) files around, production and support teams scripted massive numbers of bots to reply to a wide number of queries (phone, dns, system/application status), and it allowed people to keep an eye on technical issues that arose which might affect them, without having to bother with the inflexibility of regular lines of reporting (clueless helpdesk people.)

The system was slated to die, to be replaced by a "proprietary" chat network, which makes me sad. I've never seen anything so eminently usable for technical work in a large organization.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

"I've noticed that people also tend to be more succinct and able to express themselves in quick bursts of text--if there was any problem, you could always pick up the phone on the side."

In some situations this is true, but I guess it only really holds where everyone involved knows the subject domain equally well. for example, I've found the exact opposite: in work we use IRC for realtime tutorials on our DL programming courses and, while most of the students (mainly part time postgrads working at various companies) pick it up quite easily, the most regular problem we encounter is caused by students struggling to formulate succinct and unambiguous questions. Quite often a refinement process is needed to identify the issue the student is having problems with: most of them have no programming background and they are not used to the terminology or the need for accurate problem specifcation, so each aspect of their question needs checking to ensure that the question they thought they asked was the one they asked.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[plcurechax]

I had an 18 month project at a major international investment bank, helping them put together their firewall/network security team.
...and fear of leaving a paper trail (hence formality) of email...

Am I the only one who noticed the potentially illegal attempt at bypassing the legal paper trail required by law?

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[mwood]

I like that "fear of leaving a paper trail". It makes people forget about badmouthing others and cut to the actual problem.

I like formality. When people take the time to figure out how to say what they think, I spend less time trying to figure it out for them.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[fuzzybunny]

First, you assume that there _was_ a law. This is pre-Sarbanes/Oxley and friends, which established extremely strict logging criteria for any company listed on a US exchange. Additionally, I worked one of this company's Swiss offices; don't assume that all countries have similar reporting laws to the US (although since Sarbanes-Oxley, most international firms are compelled to meet US requirements.)

Second, note that I didn't say "there was no paper trail." Rather, there was less fear of leaving one--IRC messages can be logged just as easily as mail if the situation demands. It's purely psychological; if you use IM at work, compare the format of info you give to people via mail to that you send via IM.

Third, not to nitpick, but "paper trail"?

Think before you send.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[fuzzybunny]

This is true, as with any tool. Frankly, I've encountered far more blubbering and failure to GET TO THE POINT on the phone than I have in real life, far more evasion and equivocation on email than in IRC. What was unique about my situation is that this was a "core" work application; each user had it installed (ca. 80,000) and most used it regularly. This is extremely conducive to learning how to communicate effectively.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[maximilln]

I've found that managers like to wield the paper trail over their employees. I've had experience with managers who even used the paper trail as a harassment tool. Generating enough sheets of paper--good, bad, or indifferent--causes stress for a relatively large number of people. That stress coming from multiple directions can be used to harass an employee.

For example: Generating an HR complaint for an employee who shows up at 8:35 AM every day. Technically it's FLEX time but the manager has registered a previous complaint with HR that he wants the employee in by 8:30 AM. No justification is needed. No questions are asked. After a year of this the targeted employee starts getting the evil eye of scrutiny from the department head and the HR managers. As water-cooler conversation expands the targeted employee starts getting the evil eye of scrutiny from managers who aren't even in his chain of command. After a year or two of this an employee can be harassed into a state of frustration at which point the management can turn up the heat and run the poor fellow out on a rail.

Wow. Wasn't that fun? Didn't you see how he twisted and squirmed, how he started getting real nervous and furtive towards the end, how we drove him into snapping people's heads off until we could write him up for feeling isolated and antisocial?

I really don't like paper trails. From my experience, anyone who either asks for a paper trail or insists on keeping a paper trail is covering up for something that their conscience tells them is wrong.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[mwood]

Okay, but anybody who tries that sort of stuff on me should be wondering what kind of a paper trail *I* am building on *him*. :-}

Harrassment only works on the relatively powerless, or those who *think they are*.

Re:Best Work Tool Ever

[maximilln]

In any normal situation the corporate ladder would've prevented this sort of thing. There should always be enough levels of separation where it would take too much effort to involve enough people in the slander. In the situation to which I was referring the corporate ladder went from the new guy to a senior group leader to a department head. The new guy was fscked.

Stay warm and keep breathing. That's how he sees life now.

Jabber?

[Max Romantschuk]

the lack of standards in IM protocols, as well as the preception that the distracting nature of IM precludes it from being a more useful communications medium

It's too bad that the Jabber project has been largely dismissed as a chat-thingy, when it could solve real problems in a workplace.

Say you're spellchecking a document at work, and your wordprocessor doesn't recognize a deparment name. Your word processor could use Jabber to check other word processors in your organization if they know of the word in question.

I recently read Peer-to-Peer - Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. An excellent book, containing, among other things, a chapter on Jabber.

Re:Jabber?

[TheMidget]

Say you're spellchecking a document at work, and your wordprocessor doesn't recognize a deparment name.

Ha!

Your word processor could use Jabber to check other word processors in your organization if they know of the word in question.

Hmm, unfortunately, no other wordprocessor knows what a "deparment" is either...

Re:Jabber?

[Rich]

One of the problems with Jabber is that it isn't really a very good protocol. The fact that it doesn't close the outer tags until the end of a session makes it impossible to implement efficiently using the standard XML tools (the memory requirements are ridiculous).

If you want to make a standard XML format for chat, then first thing to do is look at where Jabber went wrong and start again.

Re:Jabber?

[Ben Hutchings]

"The standard tools"? DOM may be easier to use for many applications, but it's not the only option. I think SAX would work just fine for parsing Jabber.

Re:Jabber?

[Jerf]

Not really true, it just a teensy-weensy bit of cleverness... assuming you're talking about DOM and not SAX (which requires no cleverness at all and has no significant memory impact), instead of feeding the entire document to your DOM library, feed each chunk to the DOM library. If you're brave there's some very simple string search heuristics that you can use that for all intents and purposes are 100% effective on a Jabber stream, even though in theory they could go wrong.

Been here, done this, have the code to prove it.

Re:Jabber?

[Firehawke]

I've worked with Jabber in the workplace, and the biggest problems with Jabber all center around the way the project has been at a near-standstill for the past few years.

Jabber 1.x is the only version available, but it's buggy as hell and the transports are either obsoleted (read: non-working) or crash-prone. Jabber 2 is supposed to fix a lot of the headaches, but it's been on the way for years-- and even after they release the server, it'll be months to years before updated transports are created for Jabber 2.

Then, on top of this you have a bunch of half-baked clients-- sorting through the clients to find one that meets your needs and is under a work-acceptable license adds to the headaches.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's been my experience with trying to implement Jabber in the workplace.

Re:Jabber?

[Rich]

Yes, but a well designed XML-based protocol wouldn't need you to mess about like that. You can work around these things, but there's no reason why should have to. Using SAX is still a problem if you use a validating parser (it's true you can use it if you disable validation).

Rich.

Re:Jabber?

[Jerf]

The problem is not the protocol, the problem is XML's insistence on "one XML document per stream" being a rock-hard rule. I consider a mistake but Tim Bray says it's an advantage in just this situation.

If you could have more then one root element then your DOM library would already support multiple documents coming in as discrete chunks.

There's really no way in an XML protocol around this; dispense with the element at the beginning and you can no longer think of the Jabber communication as a single XML document. Now you've got other problems.

Of course you can now say "Well Jabber shouldn't be XML then" (though I don't know that you personally would), but of course Jabber is XML for other reasons, reasons I consider very good ones. (Few people have truly taken advantage of these reasons but I'm working on it; part of the problem is that I'm first having to build an innovative way to parse XML because neither DOM nor SAX paradigms work; but again, that's a weakness of the XML libraries, not Jabber!)

Re:Jabber?

[orangaDANg]

Jabber/XMPP is actually on its way to becoming an IETF standard. As for efficient implementations, I'm sure you'll find *something* that works among the many open-source clients, servers, and libraries sitting on http://www.jabberstudio.org/project/ The mailing lists are an excellent source of help as well. Jabber's really a pretty nice protocol, and people ought to look into it a little before they knock it.

Re:Jabber?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, *IF* you want to make a standard XML for chat.

It doesn't strike me as the brightest thing to do ...

Re:Jabber?

[Rich]

I don't really accept this argument because there is no reason why you could not use the same stream to transmit multiple documents. You are correct that you can only have one root node per document but I'm not aware of anything in the XML specs that even discusses the transmition medium beyond discussing the encoding.

For the record - I think XML is a good choice, but I think Jabber throws away many of the advantages that you can gain by using it.

Re:Jabber?

[Anonymous Coward]

So put it under a catch-all node, named root for example.

It sounds like Jabber is letting cleanliness get in the way of working software.

Can a study monitoring IM be impartial?

[trystanu]

Where did the data for the study come from?

Were the participants informed that their conversations were to be monitored during this period? from study 2

"303,648 messages comprising 21,213 conversations between 692 pairs of people".

It sounds like they sampled a single population (only 700 users), perhaps from a single organisation that knew they were being monitored? If so the data surely needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Re:Can a study monitoring IM be impartial?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

It sounds like they sampled a single population (only 700 users), perhaps from a single organisation that knew they were being monitored?

Ofcourse they knew! Unless they hadn't read the fine print on their contracts.

Re:Can a study monitoring IM be impartial?

[thesp]

Statistically, this population *could* be less than 40. To have 692 unique pairs of conversants, in a well-connected network (where most people are on each other's lists), requires less than 40 nodes.

Only in poorly-connected cases, where people only add a few other nodes to their network, can you see 700 unqie users forming 692 unique pairs.

Of course, the ultimate worst possible case requires around 1400 users.

Methodology

[Stile 65]

How did Isaacs (second study) decide whose IM usage to monitor?

To comply with ethics and privacy laws, did she have to notify users that their IM conversations would be monitored? Or ask them if they accepted that their IM conversations would be monitored?

Also, were the users able to converse via IM with users outside the company? If so, were those conversations monitored as well?

I'm not saying the results are biased, I'm just saying I wish Isaacs revealed more about the sample.

Re:Methodology

[Heartz]

More importantly, if they did tell their users that their IM conversation would be monitored, how would that have affected what conversations that were going on.

If I knew that my yahoo chat messages were being logged, I'd be careful of what I typed. How they observed the participants woudl have severely affected their findings.

Re:Methodology

[prichardson]

Exactly If someone knows their conversation might be monitored then they won't talk about personal things. The results are skewed. I bet even a slashdot pole would be more accurate :)

Re:Methodology

[walendo]

I was part of the team that did the study. We were working on a prototype instant messenger (Hubbub) that is heavy on awareness (www.hubbubme.com).

Hubbub was release internally to AT&T labs first, then to AT&T as a whole and allowed to connect to the outside world. Part of the registration process for Hubbub was accepting the fact that conversations were being logged for later analysis (after being anonymized, of course). AT&T Labs is, after all, a research organization.

You can read more about the methodolgy and population sample here: http://www.izix.com/pro/lightweight/IM.php

You can read about Hubbub here:
http://www.izix.com/pro/lightweight/hubbub. php

Our book, Designing from Both Sides Of The Screen, covers the process of how it was built, too.

-w

They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Quite often, people exchange quite a bit of crucial information across the convenience of instant messaging: passwords, credit card numbers, personal information, and so on. Unfortunately, IM companies often forget that they leave their messaging completely unsecure, so anyone who can sniff the packets can steal all their information, especially after AOL screwed all PGP encrypted messages when trying to stop Trillian.

In fact, Echelon is infamous for sniffing a lot of traffic from AIM and ICQ, and anyone who thinks MSN is secure is crazy. Even though it might catch some Al-Qaeda terrorists, even they have human rights, including the right to privacy. After all, it might be you who are the terrorist one day, and you might get sent to Camp X-Ray for sending the wrong IM as a joke.

Re:They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[dreamchaser]

Many enterprise level IM systems support crypto. Lotus Sametime uses SSL I believe.

As for a right to privacy, there is none. At least not in the US. Courts have been arguing in recent years that there is such a right, but there is absolutely nothing in the Consitution regarding a universal right to privacy. A right to not be subjected to unlawful searches perhaps, but no basic privacy right.

Re:They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[duffbeer703]

right to not be subjected to unlawful searches perhaps, but no basic privacy right.

Here is the text of the 4th Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Where in this do you get the impression that persistant monitoring of private communications is ok?

Re:They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[Julian352]

AOL has implemented their own encryption that is based on public key:

Messages sent between AIM users with security credentials are digitally signed and encrypted and remain encrypted during message transmission. Referred to as "end-to-end encryption," the AIM encryption protocol is based on the S/MIME e-mail cryptographic standard.

The idea here is that if both people have a certificate, they can encrypt all of their information from start to end. The certificates used are the basic PKI that could be generated or obtained from elsewhere. (Like Verisign)

Re:They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Re:They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[iggymanz]

I don't see anything in there about workplace communication, or privacy in the workplace....it seems the courts largely don't either

Re:They're missing a crucial element: crypto.

[fungus]

This is why I use SimpLite with Trillian (or MSN Messenger)

Encrypts everything, works very well.

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"the results of an AT&T Labs study of IM use. Among the findings, "Despite the perception that IM is commonly used for social purposes in the workplace, we found that was rarely the case. Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal."""

Left hand, meet right hand. We actually have been told at AT&T to NOT use IM at all. Whee.

Re:Interesting

[Firehawke]

What division? I know for a fact that the normal landline/bundled customer service tiers use X-terminals with tightly controlled software; IM isn't an option there, period.

I'm not too sure on the straight cellphone division; they use Windows NT, but I'm not sure of the access controls since bundled billing used Citrix to access the wireless systems last I knew.

I wonder how much has changed in three years.

It doesn't mention 'lack of standards'

[ishmalius]

Does the submitter not read the article, either? The abstract says:

The first, written by two Sun Labs researchers, looks at the lack of standards in IM protocols, (...etc...)

...yet the very first sentence of the article says:

The recent rise in popularity of IM (instant messaging) has driven the development of platforms and the emergence of standards to support IM.

I think there is a disconnect here.

Re:It doesn't mention 'lack of standards'

[duffbeer703]

This is Slashdot... contridictory statements and inane articles are the norm here.

The only suprise here is that there is no references to Linux, Eric Raymond or the supremacy of open source.

Artificially Intelligent Messenger

[donnyspi]

For my senior project in school I modified an IM client written in VB6 to have AI capabilities. It can act as a desktop secretary who gets to know new people that IM you when you're away. It takes notes, keeps contact info on file, and can define words. Check it out here.

Re:Artificially Intelligent Messenger

[NETHED]

I tried it, but I was getting an msmask32.osx error. Looks pretty promising though.

IM does make a good collarboration tool

[Maestro4k]

I used to be a sysadmin for an Electrical and Computer Engineering dept. at a large university a few years back. I found that students used IM a lot, and that a large amount of the time they were using it to collaborate with friends who were home, or in another lab etc. So there is some truth to this.

That being said though, the main problem I had with IM was the security problems with service-provided clients (AIM, ICQ, Etc.) and the problems with multi-user windows environments and user privacy for the universal clients (Trillian, etc.). We ended up having to officially ban IM because of these issues. To be honest, the biggest concern was the privacy issues. We found quickly that most of the IM clients wouldn't behave properly for a non-privledged domain user. (Ironically, MSN flat out wouldn't work at all unless you had admin privledges.) We could get Trillian to work under all user accounts, but we ended up with a problem where Trillian would default to keeping its log files locally, not in the user's profile. To make it worse, those files were readable by all, and locking them down broke Trillian. Being a University, we couldn't risk the privacy issues, and it was becoming too much of a headache to spend more time on it. We had much more pressing matters to take care of. Oh yes, on our linux machines I never blocked the universal clients, as I didn't have the problems with them. I just left it as an easter egg for observant users. :)

If the big IM players would get their acts together and standardize, and stop blocking universal clients, we might finally get some good, secure, and multi-user workable clients. Then we can find out how useful IM really is or isn't. Untll then, it'll probably stay marginalized.

Hmm...

[iamdrscience]

Business related IMs, eh? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing.

Judging from the IM conversations I've had with most people outside of the geek world I think it would go something like this:

SexyJester2939: hey
kewlPanda52: hi
SexyJester2939: r u doing teh TPS report #s
kewlPanda52: what r u talking abut? those arent due til fri
SexyJester2939: THE #S 4 UR TEAM DOCS!!!!! TODAYY!!!!!!
kewlPanda52: o i c
kewlPanda52: ya I have the #s 4 that
kewlPanda52: just a sex
kewlPanda52: i mean sec lol
SexyJester2939: k
SexyJester2939: lol
kewlPanda52: ok i mail them 2 u
SexyJester2939: thx ;)
kewlPanda52: latez!
SexyJester2939: cu l8r

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you never had an IM conversation with an average teenager. I talk to my sister across IM often, and believe me, the given example isn't so strange.

Re:Hmm...

[Wolfrider]

YOU NAIL IT!

TFP. HAND.

huzzah for the slashdot lameness filter, for it is teh sux0r.

Re:Hmm...

[ealar dlanvuli]

Clearly you don't work with professional adults. The average worker where I work uses proper spelling/grammar/capitilization/punctuation in all communications.

thet need some way to manage the ids though

[the_2nd_coming]

perhaps like how Apple has done by integrating presence into mail.app, so a person can search their e-mail directory, click on their AIM name and send an IM.

Re:I find that 99% of my IM time is non-work relat

[Digital11]

Lol... Best jab I've in a while, I applaud. =) (No offense to the grandparent, but ya gotta admit he got ya there.)

First Post...

[Realistic_Dragon]

Or it would have been, but I got distracted by an instant message.

my typical workday breakdown

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot.org : 6 hours (+/- 60 mins)
IM : 2.5 hours (interleaved with /.)
News/Email : 1 hour
Lunch : 0 hours (eat at desk)
Office Work: 1 hour
Meetings: 1 hour
----
Total: 11.5 hours / 24 hours (+/- 60 mins):O

Re:my typical workday breakdown

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

And then they're suprised when they ship their jobs offshore.

You waste company time reading news websites and writing IMs. Therefor we'll replace you all by analfabatic people from a far and strange land. And because they are analfabetic, they wont be distracted by websites or IMs when they fill out their reports.

Where I work, IM is mandatory

[marcsiry]

I work for a large provider of internet services- in fact, we make one of the most popular IM clients in use today.

Here, not being logged into IM is tantamount to not being at work at all. You're expected to be available for chat at any time you're at your desk and don't have an 'away' message up. If you can't manage 5-10 simultaneous IM conversations at once, you'd have a hard time keeping up here.

As other posters have said, it's conveniently situated between e-mail and phone- asynchronous, yet instant. Additionally, it is useful for things like large file transfers and for slinging URLs during conference calls... it makes a great collaborative tool.

The one interesting, yet mildly annoying, thing about it is the office language that has evolved around IM. The 'burstable' nature of the messaging has caused people to adopt SMS-like abbreviations for common phrases:

yt? : "You there?" used to ping people to see if they are actually available for chat. This bugs me; I personally just start the message with useful info and wait to see if I get a reply.
otp: "On the phone" - used to explain your distraction or delay in getting back to a "yt?" ping.
ygm: "You've got mail"- notify someone on IM that you've sent them an e-mail (seems redundant but it's easy to miss an e-mail notification with all the IMs flying around).

Finally, a really useful aspect is the ability to cut across multiple levels of corporate hierarchy with a flick of the "enter" key. One of the senior folks in my company stays logged in all day- his screen name is his last name (as is the case with most people here who eschew 'cutesy' screen names). I've only pinged him once or twice- sending URLs for review and the like- but it's nice to know that I can access top folk directly, and not have my e-mail screened and/or deleted by an admin assistant. Of course, if I'm not careful with how I use that access, that IM could lead to IU (instant unemployment...)

Re:Where I work, IM is mandatory

[ragnar]

I used IM at a previous job extensively and use it sparingly at my present job. I too am annoyed at the abbreviations that people use, but what can one do? I make a point of writing complete sentences, as it takes only a bit more time and it improves the odds of being understood.

Re:Where I work, IM is mandatory

[Firehawke]

Sounds like it works pretty well, though I'd be very concerned with information overload by getting swamped during critical moments.

Re:Where I work, IM is mandatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Critical moments? I think any job that involves the use of IM will be remarkably void of critical moments. It's not like the paramedics get an IM going "u back already?" on their way to the hospital with a mortally-wounded carcrash victim in the back.

Re:Where I work, IM is mandatory

[jafac]

what can one do?
set a good example, and eschew the abbreviations yourself.

It worked for me at my previous job, where we used Lotus Sametime as a secure IM client. Good stuff.

Re:Where I work, IM is mandatory

[Minna Kirai]

I work for a large provider of internet services- in fact, we make one of the most popular IM clients in use today.

Oh please. It's understandable that /. posters may want to leave their corporate affliations private, but you're not fooling anyone with that line.

The one interesting, yet mildly annoying, thing about it is the office language that has evolved around IM. The 'burstable' nature of the messaging has caused people to adopt SMS-like abbreviations for common phrases:

If you don't like it, then use your corporate-wide instant access to suggest a feature to the guys who write the darn thing: make a checkbox which will auto-translate special abbreviations into full sentences (or the reverse).

Been there done that

[Anonymous Coward]

Their gonna hire a bunch of "professors" (one from microsoft, 1 from sun, 1 from spyglass inc, 1 from mit and 2 standalone, and 1 from the government), to write a standard.

These folks will want to do "A VERY GOOD JOB". Like hurd, gnome, oo.org, STL, etc. So they will decide to employ XML, UTF, CORBA and any other useless buzzword pseudo technology hype out there and give us yet another horrible protocol. Like RTCP.

I miss the good old days where RFC worked and people wrote nice FAQs on usenet.

Re:Been there done that

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not insightful, this guy is an idiot.

with or without employees' knowledge?

[X_Bones]

I didn't see it mentioned in the second paper, but did the AT&T employees know their IM usage was being monitored? I think that would have a pretty big effect on the study if the subjects knew about it, like artificially lowering the number and length of personal conversations recorded.

But on the other hand, I'd certainly want to know if someone was spying on my personal communications (in a manner not related to any usual workplace monitoring).

Re:with or without employees' knowledge?

[Anonymous Coward]

At AT&T all your communication is assumed to be monitored. It is in paperwork that you are required to sign and review every year. On occasion people have been fired for e-mails, IM's, phone calls or surfing the web. Makes for a stressful working enviorment. AT&T is also good at making the numbers come out the way they want them to. They even have people that specialize in making the numbers look good.

Re:with or without employees' knowledge?

[Frisky070802]

So let's say employees knew they might be monitored. Then you can assume that the study says how IM will be used in a workplace environment subject to monitoring, which is still useful data. It says employers need not fear such abuse under those conditions.

Re:Wow! Awareness is not a buzzword

[.nuno]

I've been working and integrating with Lotus Sametime for some years now and it's "awareness" is quite impressive.

Sametime's awareness allows us, for instance, to easily display on a web page which ones of your buddys are also browsing through the same page (and this is done server side). The same thing with Lotus Notes and any Notes-based application. In the new Notes 6.5 you can right-click the name of someone who sent you an e-mail and start chatting with them.

In no way I want to defend Sametime, it has a long way to go in user-friendliness (it's so bad that even IBM created an alternate client, NotesBuddy)and inter-connectivity, but it does make it very easy to be "aware" of the status of your fellow workers by, for instance, showing a green square just before their names in your inbox.

Say you got a mail from your boss refusing your raise - you can quickly see he's online and bump through is office with half the company routers and some ethernet cables just to "get him a strong message of disagreement".

So, I strongly believe that awareness is not a buzzword anymore.

Monitored??

[morie]

Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal

If you monitored them with consent, couldn't that introduce a bias?

If they were monitored without consent, wouldn't that be a breech of privacy?

[Hell no, I didn't read the article. If the answer is there, You will tell me next, won't you?]

Re:Monitored??

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal

Is that a good or a bad thing? I mean this could mean 87% of those people really dislike each other and therefor only talk when absolutely unquestionaly necessary. I mean that can't be good for team building, can it?

Re:Monitored??

[Dhalka226]

If you monitored them with consent, couldn't that introduce a bias?

Why? That's like saying that conducting a research study introduces a bias into whether or not somet hingreally works. They're just observing to see what goes on.

If they were monitored without consent, wouldn't that be a breech of privacy?

You have no privacy at work. Your employer can rummage through your desk drawers or read your email and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't know if you're in the US, but the Constitution is written to limit government not the citizen. Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please.

Re:Monitored??

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is whatever workplace they monitored had blank we're-allowed-to-spy provisions in their contracts that people simply weren't aware of.

Also, in many countries, it's not illegal for your employer to spy on you without telling you.

Re:Monitored??

[neglige]

Why? That's like saying that conducting a research study introduces a bias into whether or not somet hingreally works. They're just observing to see what goes on.

If they had the consent of the people, it would have introduced bias. Even if the company allows private messaging at the workplace, private IM usage is likely to be lower, because everyone wants to appear working instead of chatting. Maybe because they didn't want to give the company a reason to ban IM, maybe to look like good workers. And if the company does not allow private IM, then just to keep their job.

If the people knew they were monitored, they acted different. If they didn't know (or forgot, if they gave their consent month ahead), the results are probably valid.

And, as many scientists believe, you can't examine something without changing it.

Re:Monitored??

[poot_rootbeer]

The users gave their consent by coming in to work that day. The company owns the computers. The company is paying you to use the computers for work-related activities. While it could be considered a poor choice of ethics to monitor employee's IM conversations without their explicit consent, it's entirely legal.

If you don't agree with the practice, you're welcome to pursue employment elsewhere.

Re:Monitored??

[Minna Kirai]

While it could be considered a poor choice of ethics to monitor employee's IM conversations without their explicit consent, it's entirely legal.

There is such a thing as workplace privacy. Obviously, the employer placing cameras in the toilets to broadcast scatological porn would be a breach of expected privacy (even though the employee is on the clock and everything in the room is company-property). Does secret monitoring of phone or IM also violate? That's not totally clear cut- in some states, employees have already won such lawsuits.

"Wiretap" laws aren't uniform, but they often make it is a crime to record a communication if either party has a reasonable belief it is not being recorded. (Well, that's quoting the California courts, who may not be entirely mainstream...)

Re:Monitored??

[Minna Kirai]

I don't know if you're in the US, but the Constitution is written to limit government not the citizen.

In the US, laws limit citizens and corporations. For example, wiretap laws make it illegal to listen to a conversation without the speaker's knowledge.

Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please.

Since my cable modem lines are the property of AOL-TimeWarner, do they have the right to do with as they please?

Re:Monitored??

[Dhalka226]

Since my cable modem lines are the property of AOL-TimeWarner, do they have the right to do with as they please?

Sigh. Let's try this again.

"Since computers, networks, etc at work at taken to be the property of the company--it's theirs to do with as they please."

If you work at your ISP, then yes, what you do at work and with their equipment is theirs. They can read your email, they can ruffle through your desk drawers, and they can monitor your IMs.

Yes, there are wiretap laws. They also don't apply to the situation I described. I searched Google for the phrase, "do wiretap laws apply to employers?". One of the results says, quote, "With the federal and state wiretapping statutes permitting employers' monitoring e-mail communications, and with courts holding that common law intrusion into seclusion privacy claims don't apply since there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when e-mail is sent over an employer's system, employees should understand that employers may monitor electronic communications even without reserving the right to do so in their e-mail policies." The emphasis is mine.

For another matter, courts have ruled that employers may monitor phone calls in an effort to determine if the content is business or personal. There is usually a time limit they can listen. Another quote, related to both matters, from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, reads: "Workers of the world are exposed to many types of privacy-invasive monitoring while earning a living. These include [. . .] Internet monitoring and filtering, E-mail monitoring, instant message monitoring, phone monitoring [. . .] and keystroke logging." You'll note that while the article lists all sorts of reasons employers might not want to monitor such communications, it makes no mention that they can't. It does go on to mention restrictions on how and when they can, according to legislation, but has a massive piece dedicated to all the loopholes and instances where employers can still do it.

In short, one last quote, from this page, which just about sums it up: "The second exemption is that the ECPA [the legislation that provides what few restrictions there are] exempts from liability the person or entity providing the communication service. Where this service is provided by the employer, the ECPA has been interpreted as permitting the employers broad discretion to read and disclose the contents of e-mail communications, without the employee's consent."

It sucks. I will be the first to admit it. But it's a legal reality.

Happy now, or can I expect a snooty response?

Ephemeral is sometime good

[Anonymous Coward]

IM, it seems to me, just doesn't have the permanency and longevity that email does.

Actually, IM's ephemeral nature can be selling point. All those conversations about where to go to lunch probably don't deserve long-term storage. Years ago researchers were writing papers about how email was being used for too many incompatible tasks; IM helps solve that problem.

Granted, there are situations where IMs contain useful information or by law must be recorded, but logging IMs is generally easy when necessary.

usually it's covered in the policy handbook

[SolemnDragon]

Most large US companies have some kind of blanket statement for 'computer and electronic media use' which covers phone conversations as well. Usually it's in with the 'i will not make personal phone calls to distant countries' clauses. In some cases it's a message that pops up every time you boot up your computer. And it's there for exactly those reasons: Your email and IM may be monitored, your web use may be monitored, and they may not tell you. IT's gotten some interesting challenges in recent years, but most of the time it serves to keep employees from suing because the company can point to it and say, "But we told you right up front."

Doesn't mean it's right, and the 'reasonable expectation of privacy,' has come up over and over. But companies still seem to think that it's the best way to do it, i guess.

Re:usually it's covered in the policy handbook

[Stile 65]

That's what I was saying, actually. Presumably people read the AUP/TOS for their employers' computer systems before coming onboard with the company. If I saw a clause like that and knew they had the technical capability of monitoring my usage, I wouldn't use IM for personal purposes or read Slashdot at work. ;)

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[G4from128k]

how is it legal to monitor IM sessions without the other parties consent?

Companies have the right to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. This is more than just an issue of "their house, their rules." If some employee is using IM/email to perpetrate a crime (e.g. sexual harassment, fraud, etc.), the company can be held liable for not doing something about it. Thus, at some level, companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises. If some companies choose not monitor, then it is because they are very trusting, foolish, or corrupt.

Workflow

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a secure IM solution, and my observation is that people generally use it for workflow, albeit informally. "XX is on the phone", "Could you drop by for a minute", "Let me know when you're out of XX application", "What are you doing for lunch?"....Those are the types of things I've observed. People no longer really use email once they have a decent IM solution that's not AOL or Microsoft. The way I look at it, AOL would never use MSN, Microsoft would never use AOL, so why would anyone use either.

IM is a great tool

[knightrdr]

Some people will invariably use IM for personal use. So what? We use it a lot to communicate between departments within IT. I would be more worried about people running Kazaa. :) Here at Novartis, it is nice because we're always multitasking. If I need to contact somebody who is on the phone, I can usually IM them and get a faster answer. Speed is critical when angry people are waiting for an answer.

Just a thought to improve productivity

[lhpineapple]

1. Don't allow MSN Messenger,AIM,Yahoo! in the office. Keep personal IM strictly separate from work IM.

2. Use IM clients that restrict who talks to who. If you are working in a team, you should be able to talk to your team via IM, then e-mail/call other people to get their IM if necessary.

3. For the love of God, get rid of custom away messages.

Re:Just a thought to improve productivity

[ShinmaWa]

1. Don't allow MSN Messenger,AIM,Yahoo! in the office. Keep personal IM strictly separate from work IM.

Absolutely! There are several enterprise IM applications out there (e.g. Lotus Sametime) as well as enterprise versions of Yahoo and AIM that can be restricted to the company's intranet.

2. Use IM clients that restrict who talks to who. If you are working in a team, you should be able to talk to your team via IM, then e-mail/call other people to get their IM if necessary.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you are talking about something similiar to an ACL or "mailing list" type thing that requires an administrator or some other third party to determine who you can and can't talk to, that could become an administrative nightmare in a hurry. Its been my experience that people just don't have the time nor the inclination to send random messages to random people at work. Therefore its just not worth the considerable overhead of such a restriction.

3. For the love of God, get rid of custom away messages.

This I utterly disagree with. People use custom away messages to convey all kinds of useful information, such as "Away from desk, call cellphone to reach me" or "On a conference call, I'll be available at 3pm". Why, for the love of God, shouldn't an enterprise IM system have this useful feature?

Sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the proposals sound like what Microsoft is trying to do with Longhorn.

Some of the logic behind is simple at the moment but from what I've read on Blogs you should be able to write your own rules and the system will follow that.

e.g. If message from Important Person always show,
or,
If message from a Person involved in a Meeting Today always display.

Re:I find that 99% of my IM time is non-work relat

[carpe_noctem]

ObviousGuy's warning level is currently at 45%. Would you like to warn this user anonymously?

Hey!

[MikeXpop]

I'm a woman you insensitive clod!

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

not in the EU. workplace spying is banned

Beware the emoticons...

[wirefarm]

whats that perl script you've got running on server X

That made me laugh - We use it for that at work and it often will interpret characters in a pasted script and convert them to "smileys"...

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[mwood]

[Because of duty to combat harrassment etc.] "companies have an obligation to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises."

Wouldn't blanket monitoring open the company to *increased* liability? Surely the way to go is to wait for a complaint/subpoena and then monitor *only* what is requested by the court.

What was wrong with 'talk'?

[PSargent]

When I was back at Uni (Showing my age here) we all used to use 'talk' or 'ytalk' to have realtime chats over the network.

It worked great. People would be logged-in in their rooms, and it was good for 'Just going for a drink. U coming?' type messages, or asking problems on work stuff or whatever.

Nobody ever seemed to use it in the real world though, although it's still in the distros.

Re:What was wrong with 'talk'?

[Gestahl]

I find [y]talk to be more difficult to communicate with vs. IM. The ability for both of you to type messages at once and interrupt each other can be very counter-productive and distracting (... no, you ... etc.). AIM forces messages into discrete pacakages, which kills somewhat the RT aspect of it, but typing is not RT anyway ;-).

Re:What was wrong with 'talk'?

[dingman]

Nobody ever seemed to use it in the real world though, although it's still in the distros.

ytalk was always my collaboration tool of choice when working with other sysadmins on a system. You just can't beat the ability to intersperse shell sessions in your conversation. I don't know how it stacks up for purposes other than collaborative Unix administration and helping folks troubleshoot their *nix boxes, but it's *great* there.

I have no idea whether non-techies found it useful - there was no shell access for accounts outside the CS department after my Freshman year. The only complaints I heard were about the loss of Vax mail. Mostly from people who thought Vax was a mail client.

News organizational use

[mhollis]

Where I work, we have used a program (which started out running on dumb terminals connected to a DEC minicomputer) for many years to keep apprised of the newswires (AP, Reuters, TASS, etc), write and edit news stories and prepare a rundown for a news program. The IM equivilant on this program is the "Top Screen" which will allow you to determine whether or not the person you are trying to message is logged onto the server and will store and forward the message when the person does log on. You are able to store and save messages and conversations. This was always a better idea for short messages than e-mail, especially for group collaboration on a story. In a large organization, it's really nice to be able to message a correspondant or producer in the London Bureau or in Baghdad to get the general gist of a story as it develops. Presently the program is owned by Avid and our version is called iNews (Sorry, Apple). The company I work for presently has rolled out an internal "chat" client that is supposed to allow us to universally chat throughout the company. None of the news people use it, preferring the "top screen" within iNews (which everyone working in news tends to have open anyway). This makes for further segregation between upper level management and those of us who actually produce the content that makes us money. So I would add that, within a corporation, certain clients and standards for instant messaging become part of the corporate behaviors. I should suggest that further study along these lines might be in order.

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[henrik]

You forgot to state which country you were talking about. The USA?

In Sweden the company does not have the right to read your emails.

IM at least as useful as telephone..

[im a fucking coward]

We've recently analyzed IM via IRC and Jabber, and though it's subjective due to our business type, the finances broke down as a 8k savings monthly for my department vs. telephone and fax usage.

Like freakin' duh, we needed a financial analyst to tell us using paid for bandwidth rather than incurring added phone expenses saved the company $'s?! I'm slightly happier to see we weren't quite as stupid as AT&T in having to invent a new analysis methodology prior to realizing the blaringly obvious.

Invaluable to a Telecommuter

[ReadParse]

I've been using instant messaging for many years, but I didn't start using it as a regular part of my work until late 1999 or early 2000 while working at IBM. We had Lotus Sametime, which eventually also became an AIM client, so we could use Sametime to talk with other IBM'ers and AIM for people outside, all in the same chat client.

This came in handy when I left IBM, as I was able to continue communicating with many people at IBM through AIM without their needing to change anything. Since then, some of them have left IBM as well, and we continue to use AIM to communicate. Now that I work at home, these people are my co-workers, although they all have other employers -- and some work at home, some have had periods of not working at all. But we still have this community and it keeps me sane.

I'm a one-man web department at my job and my employer is on the opposite coast. I speak and e-mail with my boss and have a good relationship with him, but he's busy with other things besides me and he's not into IM. Not only do I need the social connection that IM provides, but it's a great technical resource for me as well. There are 2 or 3 of us who bounce questions and ideas off each other. They help me and I help them.

Of course, there's a lot of the social stuff also. We send funny URLs to each other and joke around a lot. It's a duplication of the environment we would have (and indeed used to have) as coworkers in the same office. Many of them are from the same job, but some are from other jobs, so it's like a "greatest hits" album of friends and coworkers from several jobs, some of whom don't know each other at all. It's fascinating and terribly useful.

RP

Ignorance == Bliss?

[G4from128k]

Wouldn't blanket monitoring open the company to *increased* liability? Surely the way to go is to wait for a complaint/subpoena and then monitor *only* what is requested by the court.

"Don't ask, don't tell" may work in the U.S. Army, but a blind corporate eye may not be a sufficient defense in court. A 2000 article suggests that companies can be held liable for harassment in any media once any knowledge of harassment surfaces. A 2002 article suggests that many large companies can and do monitor email and surfing in the U.S.

Jurisdiction matters too, as other posts to this thread suggest, the EU has workplace privacy laws and personal data laws that forestall nonconsensual monitoring (the EU's personal data laws even complicate consensual monitoring). There are probably differences within the U.S., too. I would not be surprised if more liberal jurisdictions have both greater workplace privacy rules and hold companies to greater levels of liability for misconduct on company IT systems.

Re:Ignorance == Bliss?

[mwood]

"Knowledge of harrassment" sounds like a formal complaint to me. That is, a piece of paper with a signature and specifics that would allow me to limit the search (and our exposure) rather severely. And even then, absent a court order, I'd want our counsel's opinion that we would be permitted to make such a search. We can be sued by *either party* if we do the wrong thing.

Double-edged sword (big brotherish)

[Frisky070802]

I work at a company where IM is used substantially. Most of my coworkers seem to be online in that fashion much of the time, as am I. But it's a bit of a risky proposition, when one can put a "alert when online" bit on someone, and then pounce on them via IM the moment they become active.

One time I was telecommuting, but having networking problems, and I didn't go active via IM until noon (even though I'd been working all along). My second-level manager sent me an IM moments after I went active. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Think again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't allow MSN Messenger,AIM,Yahoo!

Unless you need to communicate with clients who are on those networks.

Use IM clients that restrict who talks to who. If you are working in a team, you should be able to talk to your team via IM, then e-mail/call other people to get their IM if necessary.

Surely non-work social chats are far more common with your "team members." Your idea reminds me of an old mail system developed by a Large Corporation that let people only send 3 kinds of mail messages: to their boss, to people who reported to the same boss, or a broadcast message to all direct reports. Funny, no one uses that today...

For the love of God, get rid of custom away messages.

Why? Doesn't "At dentist, back at 3:00" help everyone?

IM is useful for those who can't verball speak...

[antdude]

I have speech and hearing impediments (can't talk clearly and speak clearly). IM is used OFTEN with coworkers, friends, strangers, etc. It is very difficult and annoying to use someone else to speak and hear for me in person and over telephone. I think without IM, I wouldn't have a job.

Easily Monitored

[Anonymous Coward]

Universal IM standards mean easy monitoring by the gov't.

The other 80.6% of conversations...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal."

The other 80.6% of conversations were completely undecypherable and the topics were too retarded to be categorized:

QTPiE90210: a/s/l?
SnOoP69: 18/m/Nizzew Yizzork Bizotch u?
QTPiE90210: a/s/l?
QTPiE90210: o lol
QTPiE90210: 17 f Nourth New joursey n d houze!!1!!!111!
SnOoP69: sheeeeeiitt u b a skank n d 03
QTPiE90210: aint no skank herre lol
SnOoP69: u cyba wif me ur whut
QTPiE90210: r u hot?!?!
SnOoP69: y u ask u dun thnk i hot lol ho i b 2 hot 4 u n d 03
QTPiE90210: juss checkin i dun wanna get aids n shizzit
.
.
.
.

Maybe what it meant

[phorm]

This could be intended to voice that due to an existing/previous lack in IM standards, such standards are being implemented for current/new versions?

Corporate IM Servers?

[acaird]

I read an earlier post suggesting that Jabberd isn't ready for production, although it seems to be the best in theory (open source, clients for everything, moving along an IETF track).

So what do people use, then?

Re:Corporate IM Servers?

[AlXtreme]

Was wondering myself a few days ago: http://beta.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Q_2067 9294.html It seems companies are content at just using proprietary messengers, there seem to be many made for local networks. Jabberd does work, but it's not flexible at all. Would make a nice project...

Security risks

[Maznafein]

Well, as a contractor with the government our department has made all instant messaging "illegal" for the portion of the network I control. Gradually all other networks will be decomissioned and all users will be here. It is a pain in the ass blocking AIM, YAIM and all that.

The PIX just isn't built for stuff like this. Have to route the login servers to localhost, and there seems to be new ones every day.

Lucky for me they'll be getting some silly product or another (websense, or web something or another from netiq) to help combat this.

Their reasoning? People could start talking about something they're not allowed to and it going to a third party server. Just can't allow that.

Yes, my users are pissed off. But what can one do when enforcing policy?

-maz

old question

[Anonymous Coward]

can't we have a uniform system that allows high level comm between computer systems, as well well as between humans (and the mix of the two)? Not RPC services, but messages on the level of std in, out, and err. At least if a system is in place that allows either an admin to define who, what, where and how certain entities (human or machine) get notified of key events then you can use just one set of standard rule sets and filters for anything from Bob informing Jane of the 5 dev machines now up and what the IPs are to the monitoring system itself notifying the asset and task queue of the same and automating any tasks necessary at that point.

As for "awareness" I am reminded that its time to check on the various foolish patents sites and see how the patent for "Awareness Monitoring" is holding up. Patents like this are always an issue with progress

Get through a busy phone line!

[coinreturn]

When I want to talk to somebody and there's someone in their office, I use the phone to get a priority interrupt. When the phone is busy, I use IM, allowing me the chance of an even higher interrupt.

The REAL lesson here...

[teneighty]

The only conclusion you can really make from this article is: If you want productive use of IM in your workplace, then it must be restricted to intra-company use only. The article involved a proprietary IM system - I very much doubt that usage patterns of ordinary IM (i.e. standard IM client with unrestricted acess to the internet) is even remotely the same. In this sense, IM is quite similar to the phone - it's just that many employers haven't caught onto abuse of IM yet, simply because the issue of persnal use isn't highly visible (unlike the phone - if you spend all day chatting with your friends on the phone, people become aware of it very quickly). I've seen absolutely unbelievable abuse of personal IM in some workplaces. It can be a real productivity killer - but then, so can the phone, or meetings, etc if abused. The solution? Make IM traffic as visible as phone usage (eg. usage statistics could be on an intranet page somewhere perhaps?)

IM == phone

[CrisDias]

My boss one came to me saying that he wanted us all to shutdown IM in the office. "It's too distracting".

I asked him how much phone usage dropped after IM. If IM was being used "just to chat" so was the phone, but with IM people could keep working while talking about the latest Survivor episode or American Idol qualifiers. Phone usage for personal purposes dropped to almost zero.

Of course that didn't stop him from keeping with the IM blackout plan.

What I did? Installed one with a boss-key. ;)

IRC - Sorry, it's not a buzzword

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, IRC cannot be used in a corporate environment because it is not a buzzword like "IM" is. Please disable your IRC software immediately.

Thank you,
The Management

Your not the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

When XML first came out I was all excited about it (as a programmer), but now I absolutely hate it. What a nightmare! Some ideas are better left on the drawing board.

Ask your lawyer is monitoring is right for you.

[G4from128k]

"Knowledge of harrassment" sounds like a formal complaint to me. That is, a piece of paper with a signature and specifics that would allow me to limit the search (and our exposure) rather severely. And even then, absent a court order, I'd want our counsel's opinion that we would be permitted to make such a search. We can be sued by *either party* if we do the wrong thing.

Excellent point. It appears that companies can be damned if they do, damned if they don't monitor. I got the sense that letting a U.S. worker surf porn sites on a U.S. company computer would be tantamount to letting them post such pictures on the lunchroom bulletin board -- creating a "hostile workplace" with potentially public displays of sexually suggestive material. Likewise, I would imagine that RIAA could make a case against the company if employees download copyrighted materials on company computers.

But your point about legal counsel is totally correct. As "deep pockets" companies can get sued both by those harmed by employee's misue of company IT and by those that who would abuse a company's IT systems. Perhaps all these conflicting regulations and case law precedents on the rights and responsibilities of companies is more about full employment program for lawyers.

Re:Ask your lawyer is monitoring is right for you.

[mwood]

Well, yes, ask your lawyer. But also, it doesn't become the company's problem until the company finds out. If employee A gets nasty IMs from employee B and feels threatened, but says nothing to anyone, it's A's problem. If A complains to B, it's now B's problem. If A complains to A's boss, it's the company's problem. But if the company is snooping IMs, then it's the company's problem even if A never says a word, apparently. In that last scenario the company has liability without notice, so I would hope that counsel says "don't monitor until ordered to." But IANAL so I could be way off.

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[AnotherBlackHat]

Companies have the right to monitor all IM, e-mail, files on their premises.

No, companies do not have this right.

Employees have a right to privacy, even on the job, and that includes phone conversations, email, and IM.

And even if you wanted to claim that companies had some rights over their employees' personal lives,
they wouldn't have those rights over the people their employees are talking to.

Of course, not having the right to do it is not the same as not doing it.

-- this is not a .sig

email and IM are really important if you're deaf

[StandardDeviant]

Or if you're like me and (mostly) deaf[1], IM and email are *vastly* preferable communications channels because it lets me shift the data to a vector where I have normally-functioning sense organs. (I include IRC in the IM heading, since it's pretty much the same thing.) As others have noted, it's *far* easier (at least for me and most of the other people I know) to multiplex their attentions across things on the same screen and using the same input devices than across multiple input devices (phone and computer, person in cube and computer, phone and person in cube, etc.), so not only does it enable me to communicate better, IMHO it enables me to communicate more efficiently than the average person using phone/voice mail would be.

[1] I hear "ok" person-to-person with hearing aids, improved by visual hints (lip reading, posture clues, etc.), but sticking a hearing aid up next to a hard surface like a phone is a recipe for Really Freaking Annoying Feedback. (Yes, some manufacturers have so-called "t-coils" that are supposed to allow compatible phones to work at a distance from your head, but I've yet to find any combination that works worth a damn.)

Easy stuff.

[Trejkaz]

My last job did it right. Every email account they created for a staff member, they created an IM account with the same username. And use for work was assured because we didn't enabled any transports, nor server-to-server communications.

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[Trejkaz]

Companies do have the right to log email and instant messaging, but generally do not have the right to do it without the consent of the user.

Needless to say though, if you did this survey with every user knowing they were being spied upon, of course you're going to see very few personal communications.

JDOM works too.

[Trejkaz]

JDOM works too, even if you want to parse the stream from the top level. How do you do it? Remove each element from its parent after it's finished being parsed.

Log on the server.

[Trejkaz]

This is exactly why IM servers allow logging on the backend. You don't even have to be using a specific client for it to work, then, and no configuration either.

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[AnotherBlackHat]

Companies do have the right to log email and instant messaging, but generally do not have the right to do it without the consent of the user.

No, companies don't have that right.
If they want to do it legally, they have to contract with all of the parties who's privacy is being violated.
That would include the person on the other end of the phone call/email/IM, not just their employees.

There are exceptions for logging in some cases, but logging != routine monitoring.

Warning all parties that it's being done can in some cases be enough of a contract, but not always.
For example, they can't (legally) monitor calls to your personal cell phone even if they told you about it, and only did it "on company time".

-- this is not a .sig

Re:how was this legal? rights & liabilities

[Trejkaz]

Warning all parties seems to be sufficient in Australia, at least. Otherwise I would have to sign a contract to call my telephone company, ISP, electricity and gas providers and landlord.

the proposed Sun features are mostly great

[spage]

RTFP, some of the Sun researchers' improvements are brilliant. The subtle initiation, the intra-line feedback that shows if the other person is typing a response, the countdown to goodbye. Can't wait! Where's the URL to download the software :o)

I have exactly these issues when /msg-ing distant colleagues on our organization's IRC. No more "Can I ask you something?", "you there?", "Is that it?" "OK, bye then" just to frame the interaction.

I'm less sold on Rhythm Awareness, we just use /nick spagefood, /nick spage_mtg and /me Out on errands on group IRC channels to communicate status. Toss in a bot watching the channel and you can tell what people are doing. I have a hard time with IM services compared with IRC because they don't offer these "community communications" as well.

The LILSYS sensor integration to guess how amenable I am to interruption seems a ways off, but it would be nice if my chat client could tell if I'm editing in a code window or on the phone (not interruptible) vs. surfing and reading e-mail (interrupt away).