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IM best-practices in the workplace
Brian McCaffrey | Sep 28 2007
What is IM used for in the workplace? My office mates and I figured out this week that we have an IM client on our corporate workstations. Novices to the world of corporate IM, we don't really know what it's used for. I've used IM clients at home, of course, but never at work and we're all at a bit of a loss on how this would be useful, if at all. A quick session of searching 43f reveals that most of the discussion up until this point has been about managing the distractions of IM and managing your coworkers' expectations of your responses. But I'm wondering, what's IM used for in business? So far in my office, people have started chat sessions with entire work teams present online and left the session open all day. Team members will post questions or comments or requests to review edits on shared documents. In one of our groups, the director has moved some of his communication to the chat room, with the expectation that his team members will read this message during the next hour or two. Is this a typical use? How about one-on-one chats with colleagues? Tell me what IM looks like at your workplace. 46 Comments
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 Re: IM best-practices in the workplaceSubmitted by xfrosch on September 30, 2007 - 10:17am.
Last place I worked used Microsoft Messenger (a) for communication between developers, in much the same way IRC is used by many open source projects; (b) a substitute for FTP; (c) a more timely substitute for email; (d) a substitute for getting up and walking across the building to visit somebody else's cubicle; (e) a means of communicating with people who happen to be offsite for whatever reason. Shortcomings of using normal IM for these things included (a) newcomers are not automatically registered; (b) participation is voluntary; (c) some people use the same IM account for business and personal life, so that you can't assume someone is working if they're online off hours; (d) it's completely inappropriate for proprietary traffic. To my knowledge IM was not used for multiparty conferencing. It might just be my old school keyboard training, but IRC still strikes me as a better solution for that. I also prefer email attachments to IM file transfer, in that the attachments are readily at hand later when I need them. ISTR Microsoft had(has?) an optional IM server integrated with Exchange, which could overcome shortcomings (a), (c), and (d). » POSTED IN:
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