Discussion on:

The increasing use of IM in the office

IM anecdotes or shenanigans to share?

We use IM to keep our support people in various support centres in touch with each other.

We use Sametime, which is secure. All others are banned.

James

We use various IM programs usually with some form of encryption depending on who it is we are communicating with and the nature of the information.

Our company uses IM (MSN to be precise) for internal communication. It does come in very handy for a quick question, or to gauge whether someone is at work or at their desk. Or if I'm on the phone with someone and need to ask my boss a question without putting that person on hold, I simply message him. I find it invaluable in many situations.

IM use required in my department. No further comment.

We've been running Spark for a few months for half a dozen of us in IT support. I have the client installed but personally don't have a use for it. I'm not aware of any plans to expand IM tools to the rest of the company, or requests to do so.

My wife works from home and has to use some form of IM to
stay in communications with her coworkers. Her company has
used Sametime and now uses Microsoft Communicator over
secure lines to stay in touch.

Unfortunately, in both applications she has run into the issue
that neither of them allows enough people in the messaging
group. With MSC in particular, once that limit has been
reached, people are randomly ejected from the group and they
have to log in again, forcing someone else to be ejected. This
obviously causes problems when they are working on an
issue.