Gartner Group released an article (again) discussing the influence and role of Public IM Service in the enterprise environment. Today they claim this influence is caused by new features such as VOIP / Telephony offered by vendors such as Yahoo and Microsoft.
… With attractive features like voice over IP, public instant messaging platforms are carrying all-encompassing clients onto users’ desktops. But free consumer-grade software downloads may expose business users to risk. …
Also the fact that users gain benefits from having access to the Public IM community is recognized as important (of course).
Their recommendation is an obvious one for the enterprise space I think
… The inclusion of VoIP in public IM services has accelerated the adoption of Internet telephony. Establish usage policies and proper security and hygiene measures for public IM and VoIP use. …
Looking at solutions that Microsoft and others have available in their Enterprise RTC platform such as Public IM connectivity, Telephony integration, Video Conferencing, Web conferencing, etc. plays exactly into this need and based on this solution there are “enterprise-ready” when it comes to security, usage policies, logging, etc.
