THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

THE JOURNAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY Business Solutions: Firms Get the (Instant) Message By MICHAEL TOTTY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL December 13, 2004; Page R8

Instant messaging used to be so simple: Either companies pretended employees weren't using it and hoped for the best, or they banned it outright.

Neither approach worked. Companies that shut their eyes to instant messaging found that all kinds of sensitive information can leak out in IMs, while viruses and other pests can use IMs to sneak in. And companies that banned instant messaging lost out on its benefits -- such as helping far-flung employees work together more productively.

Now companies are getting smarter, viewing instant messaging as a critical communication tool, like the telephone or e-mail, but one they need to control.

Until very recently, they've had pretty much two choices -- neither one of which has been ideal on its own.

First, they could go with powerful "enterprise" systems; the two biggest are International Business Machines Corp.'s Lotus Instant Messaging and Microsoft Corp.'s Live Communications Server. These platforms enable employees to use instant messaging behind the company's firewall, but they can't be used to communicate with customers, suppliers or the general public.

Second, they could manage employees' existing IM use with so-called gateways, which archive, filter and control messages to and from public IM networks, such as America Online's AIM and Yahoo's Messenger. Gateways permit more-secure communications both inside and outside a company, but they lack the enterprise systems' ability to be integrated with other office systems, like Web conferencing.

Stopgap Measures

Both of those solutions are largely stopgap measures, says Nate L. Root, a senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Companies have decided, he says, that "we'll stop the bleeding on IM, but we're not going to invest whole-hog in a technology that's going to go through some fundamental changes over the next few years."

One important change has just arrived. Earlier this month, Microsoft introduced its newest version of Live Communications Server, or LCS, which deals with one of the biggest obstacles to corporate IM use: the inability of those on one platform to communicate with the public IM networks. As a result of agreements with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit and Yahoo Inc., LCS users can now share messages with all three big public networks. (Microsoft's own MSN Messenger is the third.)

This means companies will no longer have to install different software for each of the public networks if they want to communicate with customers using AIM or Yahoo. "It's going to be a catalytic event in the industry," says Graham Lawlor, chairman of the Financial Services Instant Messaging Association, an industry group that pushes for standardized instant-messaging systems. "The other major enterprise products are going to have to respond to that."

For those who want a full-scale IM platform but don't want to restrict themselves to Microsoft or IBM servers, there's also a third way -- open source. Denver-based Jabber Inc. sells an open-source instant-messaging product favored by companies and government. (There's also a Web-based enterprise IM alternative from New York-based Omnipod Inc.)

The Capital Wireless Integrated Network, or CapWIN, an organization created to improve communications among 22 public-safety agencies around Washington, started testing Jabber about a year ago, and to date has about 325 users of the system. The Maryland and Virginia state police use the system to query law-enforcement databases, and the National Park Service used it to help coordinate public-safety activities around the April ceremonies dedicating the World War II memorial in Washington.

The system already has proved more reliable than voice-based communications. During the WWII ceremonies, someone stole a radio from the Defense Department's in-house police and security force. A radio alert of the theft was relayed to the law-enforcement agencies involved in the event. But as in the children's game of telephone, the message was garbled to suggest someone had stolen a van and uniform. Those notified in the chat room set up to help coordinate security for the event got the real message: The thief was only using the radio to flirt with a dispatcher.

Of course, companies still have the problem of all those unseen, unsecured and unregulated messages over public IM networks. Unlike e-mail, IMs aren't automatically saved once they've been sent. And many employers want to restrict certain message content -- corporate secrets, for instance, or messages that might be an embarrassment or open a company to lawsuits.

The Gateways

The answer is a gateway, which can be used with public networks alone or with public networks and an enterprise IM system. They can log messages and store their content for future review, screen messages for inappropriate or confidential content, and filter for the growing number of instant-message viruses.

They also give companies control over the names that users pick to identify themselves online. "It's not appropriate for 'studbroker' to be dealing with customers," says Francis deSouza, chief executive of IMlogic Inc., a gateway provider based in Waltham, Mass.

Three vendors dominate the gateway business: IMlogic; FaceTime Communications Inc., Foster City, Calif., the largest gateway provider; and Akonix Systems Inc., San Diego.

Rand McNally & Co., a Skokie, Ill., map and travel company, turned to IMlogic to manage its instant-message traffic after managers realized lots of employees were using America Online's AIM service for both business and personal communications. Rand McNally uses the gateway to log and easily retrieve AIM chats with customers and suppliers as well as internal messages over its Microsoft Live Communications Server.

Logging enables users to review copies of their messages and makes it possible for managers to retrieve old messages when requested by the company's personnel department. And it has the side benefit of reducing personal use of the message system.

"A lot of them were using that to communicate with boyfriends or girlfriends," says Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the company's director of information systems and operations. "Once they saw we were logging those conversations, it dried up a little bit."

Mr. Totty is a news editor for The Wall Street Journal Reports in San Francisco.

For subscribers to The Wall Street Journal Online, the URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110261694884195823,00.html