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Linux Business Software Technology

Network Chat as a Tool for Corporate Communications? 69

Posted by Cliff from the corporate-AIM-anyone dept.
rimmon asks: "I'd like to know what experience have you made with [network-enabled chatting programs] as tools to communicate with your boss, with your employees or your customers? Does your company utilize [Instant Messenger or IRC] as a communication tool (to communicate with customers, between employees and Pointy Haired Bosses? If you use or provide [chatting systems]: Is this technology an effective tool to communicate? What are the Pros and Cons? What type of chat technology do you use and what flavor of chat (open, moderated, etc.) works best for you?"
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Network Chat as a Tool for Corporate Communications? More

Network Chat as a Tool for Corporate Communications?

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  • We do... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by MattCohn.com ( 555899 )
    it's called E-Mail. All information is kept track of by a central server, all the important stuff is saved, it can be orginized into folders, works easilly across the network, and people are notified almost instantly (via. outlook) when they have a new message.

    E-Mail is the answer here.
    • Yeah, that is what we do also.

      IM is more for BS stuff.
    • Email is not necessarily the only answer here. Since email is covered by many open records laws (such as the Sunshine Laws in Florida), there is a need in public institutions for communication that occurs off the record. Face-to-face communication works when you're in the same office and phones are nice. Instant messaging, which AFAIK is not covered by open records laws (at least in Florida), serves the same purpose as stopping by someone's office or phoning, and is less of an interruption.

  • Reuters (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @07:32PM (#6610775) Homepage Journal
    Reuters sells a secured, auditable IM service [infoworld.com] for the Corporate/Financial Services market. Meets FDIC and SEC regulations. It's built on MSFT technology, but uses the Internet. Bloomburg has its own IM, but runs on their own services 'net.

    More HERE [reuters.com]...

    • Re:Reuters (Score:3, Informative)

      by crmartin ( 98227 )
      ... and a number of firms on Wall Street are killing off their IM services, and even blocking them on internal firewalls, because some judge has determined that IMs have to be preserved just as emails do.

    • Re:Reuters (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) * on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @05:34AM (#6613638)
      It's built on MSFT technology, but uses the Internet.

      The "standalone" version uses the MSN GUI, but internally I believe it is SIP [sipforum.org] over HTTPS. The "real" version runs on a 3000 Xtra dealing workstation.

      It can log everything to a database, so it's fully compliant for business use. In dealing rooms, unlogged communication is frowned upon, both by managers and staff. The logs are never looked at unless something comes to court, and they can save you from insider trading charges so there are no "geek privacy" concerns. Banks have recorded phone conversations for years.

  • Both IM and Email are good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrunkBastard ( 652218 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @07:35PM (#6610792) Homepage
    We pass quite a bit of email around, but if your company is anything like mine, we tend to ignore email for long stretches at a time.

    Instant Messaging is good, but invasive, but hey, you're at work, deal. We have a Jabber server setup, with fairly limited abilities for the average user, but some nice administrative features. Jabbers nice, it's free, and it's being continually developed.


    • tend to ignore email for long stretches at a time.

      I've noticed that the most knowledgeable and effective people in an organization tend to become swamped with email and start to ignore it. (Think of DEK.)

      They become SMTP blackholes, their email boxes full of ideas and proposals that other people want them to review. They're too busy doing things to pay attention to getting more things to do. An effective coping mechanism, by some accounts.

      Conversely, the people who are the biggest sources of email tend

  • Most companies (Score:5, Informative)

    by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) * <michaelmiller@gmail . c om> on Monday August 04, 2003 @07:42PM (#6610825) Journal
    That use Lotus for E-Mail get Sametime (and AIM-clone sans AIM features plus intranet features) bundled with it. We use it at my computer for instant messenging, which is just more convenient than e-mail for simple discussions.
    • I just wish Lotus would fix up and release their internal Linux native client. Right now to use Sametime on Linux you have to use the buggy and slow Java client =(
    • Back when I worked at IBM the quintessential messaging tool was (go figure) Sametime. While the program was nice and simple for communication, the issues I had were mainly because of the way in which it was used.

      First, similar to other posters on here, a person was not deemed "at work" unless he was on Sametime by my PHB. There were times when I wanted to get work done but instant messages kept popping up, but I know I couldn't kill the program. So I would put myself on "do not disturb" mode so no messa

      • You're absolutely right about having to be logged on for people to think you're there, especially if you're buried deep within the cubicle system.

        However I think having IM actually prevents people from bothering you with a phone call, or coming to your cube in the event of a problem. Plus if your job revolves around your computer, then you can just minimize that window and make them wait 30 seconds for your response while you're doing your job.

  • Used to use IRC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @07:47PM (#6610869)
    Worked for a company that was radically attached to IRC (you weren't at work unless you were logged onto IRC)
    Personal opinion, IRC (and typing in general) is way to low bandwidth to hold technical conversations on... What might be solved with a 10 minute phone call takes hours to discuss over IRC (especialy with the cross chat). Upside is the whole thing was logged and you could go on a company server and look through ALL of the IRC logs, the Con to that is absolutely nobody did that
    The best use I would make of IRC would be
    (nick) You there Pete
    ...
    (pete) Hey... did you ring nick ?
    (nick) Yeah, can I call you now ?
    (pete) Sure
    ...
    (phone heard ringing in the background)
    Frankly I will never work on another distributed team if I can help it. I want to sit close enough to my immediate co-workers that I know if I can bother them (based on the music they are playing usually) and take it from there... having people across three timezones suck
    • I've been administrating our IRC-server a while and I think it's great tool to communicate when all the employees don't fit in the same room.

      We have this problem that personel can come to work at any time. So when I come to work at let's say at eight and I need to ask something from my boss, who usually comes to work at 10, I walk into his room just to find out that he's not there. But with IRC I can just simply slap (* weicco slaps boss with a large bug) him and ask if he's around :)

      Long conversations

    • Re:Used to use IRC (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) * on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @05:50AM (#6613664)
      Personal opinion, IRC (and typing in general) is way to low bandwidth to hold technical conversations on...

      Yes and no. Chat systems are infinitely superior for anyone who needs to communicate what to type, especially if like most code or command line text is has case sensitivity or funny syntax. If someone wants a command or a code snippet, you can paste it to them while talking on the phone in real time.

      I can't fucking stand it when people walk over and ask me something like that. What, you expect me to sit there reciting space-that, underscore-this, no that's in caps, that's in single quotes, open curly bracket, open square bracket, blah blah, close both brackets, etc? Anyone who wants code spoken aloud - which they won't remember anyway - is a fucking idiot and doesn't deserve helping.
      • For sharing tasks, I always prefered shared consoles... How many people have written the "sh meet" application where you can create a shell with a named pipe that anyone can connect too. From there I/O can come from any of the computers.
        A security nightmare, but hopefully everyone in the company is trusted, and you have a good firewall. Of course I'd have no idea how you can do something like this on Windows (I guess some funky VNC hack would do it, but sharing a UI sucks). I have also heard about some i
  • Yeah, it's evil but it get's the job done. Setup a bunch of standard ID's and groups in a buddy list and distribute it around. It's only used for quicky communications because we are all tied to a phone headset and hard to get a hold of.

    So when there's an outage, etc. we get IM'd from folks all over the country in other data centers looking for more information. It's primarly used for this purpose and we never send anything important. It's used for instant quick communications and little else.

  • Jabber is handy (Score:3, Informative)

    by djmitche ( 536135 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:35PM (#6611177) Homepage

    I live in South Carolina, and I work as an admin for a school in Chicago. Since I'm part time, I don't get any perks like long-distance expenses. This makes for something of a problem when discussing thorny technical issues whether a wooden or metal cluebat would be best applied to the latest luser.

    I was never one to chat much. Then I tripped across Jabber [jabber.org], and thought I'd give it a shot (it's an open protocol -- lots of fun to hack cool tools onto). Turns out most of my co-workers were using one or another chat system (AIM, MSN, ICQ) for their personal communication. Jabber does a wonderful job of tying all of those networks together, so I can chat with any of them. It also allows me to incorporate some nifty scripts. My favorites are server-monitoring scripts, so I can 'chat' with my servers, and they can send me a message when unusual circumstances present themselves.

    For most purposes, I find it easier to chat via Jabber than to talk on the phone -- most of the things we discuss are best seen spelled out (snippets of code, hostnames, etc.).

    • I'd be interested in how you've set up Jabber with your servers and your server monitoring scripts. If you wouldn't mind, drop me a line. I'd like to discuss this if you have the time. Thanks!
  • We mainly use it during emergencies. We setup an IRC server and when we have an emergency (server down, etc) we log on. We are even trying out a java IRC client [jpilot.com] so that people don't have to install an IRC client or buy one.

    We don't really use it all the time, but it's functional and we can keep logs for future reference.

  • ...going to take a [stab] at the [submitter]'s use of [square brackets]?
  • We use Yahoo! IM a great deal. Also lots of email. Our development team is spread all around the country, with HQ in Boston, but several developers in New York, Texas, California, and (of course) India. Without such capabilities, life would really suck.

    I work at a healthcare company, so we have to be pretty careful about security and privacy... but that just means that we use secure email for anything containing secuity or privacy information. IM still covers a lot of ground, though.

    We've been looking
    • I was trying to get some work done with my group over IM in the lab - but the admin made me close it and told me that the lab isn't for chatting. I tried to argue but he threatened to kick me out. It's okay though, 'cause he was wearing a penguin shirt, even though none of the computers run a linux distro.

      I'm glad I payed $4000 tuition this summer to not be able to get my work done. It's great. Really.
  • On a small network I manage, I find NET SEND (with the dotNETSender GUI frontend) and Winpopup on old 9X machines is a simple solution that users easily understand. And this kind of instant messaging is good for brief comments when you don't want to be placing phone calls all over your offices, or waiting for email answers (especially when you just want to ask a short, simple question, such as "Got that file ready?"). The message pops right up on thier screen, so you know they'll notice it.

    IM in most situa
    • Net send ***

      God, how i hate this... In my office, mostly consisted of CAD users, we use the space bar and the enter key alot while we are working. 95% of those net send messages just get click off the screen instantly while we are working and most people don't even notice it.

  • Last place I worked used different channels for different things. Everyone used email. Managers and development staff used a lot of IM. And network ops tended to use chat (IRC/ICB). The IM is good when you need to get a specific person, the chat programs are good when you need (e.g.) to talk to whoever's on duty now. Email can do either (if you set up lists and such), but is slower (but more reliable). Basically, I think it all depends on what you're doing.
  • Email is of course the traditional business tool and works well enough. Technically savvy users can shunt all messages with the word 'Pfizer' or 'Novartis' or 'IBM' into folders according to job and have a forensic record of everything that was said via email.

    But the technical sophistication of any group of business users is likely to be too low to do anything more to hit 'send'. What I like about this site [slashdot.org] is how conversations sort of evolve organically and the cream of the discussions have a tendency (n
    • Nobody really cares enough to post messages to a bulletin board. BBS's like Slashdot serve as time fillers during an otherwise boring day.

      Since you know your co-workers, it's far easier to pick up the phone or pick up your ass and go talk to them.

  • Turn off opplocks! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by zulux ( 112259 )
    A lot of winodows accounting packages - Peachtree, MAS 90, Quickbooks that use files as a psudo-database crash *HARD* if you don't turn off opplocks. You can do it in both Windows Server and Samba.

    (Opplocks is windows crapy way of caching networked files for speed - it's implementation sucks)

  • We had a group news server, but management decided that if important things were going to be posted on it that an email should go out saying that there were new news postings. True story.

    Then we actually ran a MUD for a little while on the theory that it could always be running and somebody would always be around to talk to. But the old timers kept killing the interns.

    I tried setting up a Jabber server but this was right at the time when AOL was deliberately blocking the plugin so nobody wanted to use it

  • SameTime is by far the best IM I've use (especially in a corporate setting). It supports neat things like conferences, encryption, and various broadcasts. We have a number of clients (internally at least) for SameTime that tie into our LDAP directory.

    SameTime is awesome.
  • We have seven computers in our house, a couple are Linux boxes, two are XP, and the others are 98/98SE. We all share a broadband connection via a LAN. What I'd like to do is set up a chat program that is only accessible from/to the other computers on the network. No one on the Internet should be able to IM in, and no one on the LAN should be able to IM out, but we should all be able to IM each other. We often work with sensitive data (credit-cards, SSN's, etc.) that I would prefer we not have to send outsid
  • When I was interning at IBM we used a system called Sametime. It was compatible with AIM clients, but when talking to other Sametime clients it was encrypted, secure and logged. It proved a great time saver because the response/turnaround time was much lower than e-mail, but it was still less intrusive than phone calls. Not to mention you could tell at a glance the status of your co-workers. I've sorely missed this tool when working in other environments.
  • but the company i work for uses pagers. Someone wants to talk to you, they page, you get to the nearest phone and hit #, then your number, and your connected to them, if you dont respond after so long you go to voicemail. You can also email someones pager. cost effective? eh. an excellent tool to use? oh yes
  • Internally we use Sonork. It's pretty good, keeps logs and integrates with other windows apps. It allows you to conference as well as normal 1 to 1 chat. It's also nice and secure.

    Check it out

    www.sonork.com

  • There was an article about this today... (Score:3, Informative)

    by AdamBa ( 64128 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @11:36PM (#6612406) Homepage
    ...in the Seattle paper. Corporate America jumps on IM software [nwsource.com].

    - adam

  • At my section (technical support for a J2EE product), we are using YahooMessenger with good results.

    We have several tiers (frontline vs backline) and a frontline person may ask for help from backline while still talking to the customer on the phone. And as I can even hear them talking :-), I can feed suggestions without waiting for them to type.

    It is also good for asking opinions on a case (by sending a case number), for sending URLs and for backreference (for those who enable history). For me as a backli

  • What about running an NNTP server internally? It'd let people reply to others. You'd have threads showing all contact. It could be made available to remote locations, branch offices, etc.

  • I think it's called Microsoft Messenger (people are always getting it confused with MSN messenger, maybe because it's the same UI). I'd say that within an company IM provides another option to get a hold of people. For me, it's probably proven most useful when trying to get a quick but non-urgent reply from folks who get loads of email. All IM messages are from inside the company, so it effectively cuts in line in front of the spam and other email.
  • All of the developers in my group have MSDN subscriptions, which means we all have .NET Passports, which means we have MSN Messenger accounts. It comes preinstalled on XP Pro, of course, but I've turned most of my group on to Trillian [ceruleanstudios.com]--which (if you don't know) speaks AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and IRC as well as MSN, all at the same time.

  • Very useful (Score:2, Insightful)

    by cyberjam ( 695192 )
    It doesn't replace phone, email, face-to-face or NNTP, it's just another tool that's good for what it's good for.

    We're mainly using MSN and Exchange IM: main benefits are presence info - although it's not 100% accurate, it's really useful to know if somebody's likely to be at their desk.

    Biggest plus for IM itself seems to be the ability to establish a new channel of communication while on the phone e.g. during a boring conference call (lots of those!) or while on the phone to a customer, without having to p

  • Has anybody experience with (moderated) chats as a tool to communicate on special occasions between bosses and employees?
    For example to communicate important changes and news concerning the business. Using chats it would be easy to get a fast feedback on how changes are accepted throughout the company.
    p.s.: I'm the poster and I didn't use these [] brackets...
  • Most of us use Yahoo Messenger, usually with rude screen names. It was good until we all started ratting each other out to management and telling them what each other's screen names were. Now the best part of Yahoo IM is that you can set yourself invisible and duck the "did you do your timesheet" IMs.

    We use it a lot when our Exchange server goes down.

  • The company I work for uses both an Im system (msn messenger over exchange) and an IRC server for different groups of users. We are a non IT company with small IT groups scattered over many sites. The IRC channel is used primarily for our help desk to make quick announcements, and to notify one another of issues.

    We use the Im for individual, and quick communications that need to be read immediately. Just because someone gets a notice that they have new email, there is no guarantee that they will stop wha
  • At my last company we had a development team, half at the client site and half at our office. Since in neither case we had direct lines, we used YM quite effectively to ask quick questions. It also allowed us to pass source code files back and forth, since we did not have an internet based source code control system. It was definitely fast for quick questions that did not need a phone call.
  • I work for a middle sized company...about 300 employee's I'd say, but only around 70 of them have computers. I run a Jabber server on an old Proliant with a Pentium Pro 200 mhz at work, and Rival V3 (Freeware, not open) on the Windows 2000 clients. The users know that it's just for instant stuff that doesn't need to be archived, and that they can be read by anyone. The condition to implement was that we could take a look from time to time to see what people are chatting about... We very rarely see personna
    • Ok, typing Slashdot posts while on the phone gives bad results. Sorry for the poor wording and formatting, but I think you get the idea..
  • I am sometimes called upon to negotiate with IT suppliers as part of my job. I am part of a scattered team: 7 of us located in 6 cities on 3 continents.

    In the old days (i.e., before Instant Messaging), our negotiation team needed to fly to a common location in order to negotiate with a supplier. This was necessary so that we could stay in touch with one another during the negotiation.

    Now, we all get on a telephone conference bridge with the supplier's team, and then we start up an IM conference that onl
  • We use Yahoo! IM and MSN Messenger here, with Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux clients. It's quite handy when a tech is in a computer lab in a school without a phone, but needs to contact another tech for help. Sure beats e-mail for hands-on help.

    Would be nice to setup a Jabber server to start hosting the IM service ourselves. That way we wouldn't have to worry about possibly sensitive info passing across the Internet, we could keep it all within our WAN, and possibly even encrypt it.
  • a dot-commin', ASP-writin' cubicle dweller, I worked in an old warehouse where most of the time, the person you needed to talk to was in a different part of the building.

    We used ICQ, sometimes quite a bit. I preferred it to people calling me about something that required a very short answer, especially while I was trying to get a website cranked out. It was also helpful to have ICQ mark you as away when your screensaver kicked in... that way, people know you're not at your desk. Or mark yourself as busy
  • Where I work, we use a combination of AIM and Y!M. Most people use AIM (though I'm slowly converting people to Trillian...) for day to day stuff. However, since we often have conference calls between our various offices, it's great to have video conferencing; the 'remote' offices especially like it. Y!M is ok, it allows video chat between many parties at the same time. However, it only updates 1 frame a second, so it sucks in that way.

    Does anyone have a better solution?

    Thanks.

    Todd
  • A few of my clients who have completed OS X migrations use iChat with Rendezvous, for a nice, setup-free buddy list, and they love it. No more picking up the phone or hollering over cubicle walls for quick questions. Exchanging files with people is now much easier, they don't even have to bother with e-mail or dropping them on the server... just drag the file onto the intended recipient's name and drop it. Now with the video conferencing, some are prepared to use that and save themselves long (like, 10 minu
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