Rise of Instant Messaging Options and Services, Finding the Right Business Solution

By Daniel Brecht
Contributing Writer

Enterprise messaging services have evolved over the years to include instant messaging for coworkers to communicate with each other seamlessly and at virtually no cost. Although messaging has sometimes been seen as a cause for interruptions and distraction in the workplace, when used for job purposes, it represents a great collaboration tool to quickly resolve issues and make decisions faster.

More immediate and less formal than e-mails, instant messages are used for quick communication and immediate answers. Services like Skype (News - Alert), Google Hangouts, WhatsApp – the three dominating the IM market – and others provide simple, comprehensive ways to communicate. Often larger companies have their own instant messages services to connect employees.

Unified communication apps can make a real impact for a business, explains Bhavin Turakhia, the CEO of international calling service Ringo as well as a serial entrepreneur. Turakhia has written a piece for VentureBeat, a source for news and perspective on technology innovation, last week regarding some of the best and worst enterprise messaging services today. He points out that apps like Flock.co (a multi-platform messenger for teams and businesses with desktop and mobile clients), Slack (a power user-messaging software that provides various integrations that make it easy for software engineering teams to integrate with Github), and Cotap, a secure mobile messaging for business teams, have made working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.

The post explains how Flock.co, Slack, Cotap, and other similar offerings provide a new wave of instant messaging solutions that are apt alternatives to using personal messaging apps in the workplace. With little to no cost and no IT staff to support, organizations that adopt such IM solutions can achieve more with the same or less resource. As this new wave of enterprise communication services has not been massively adopted by companies yet, it is hard to predict what the IM future will hold in store for such innovations going forward.

Often organizations do not address properly the shortfalls of messaging apps: The lack of built-in security, for example. Many IT teams are still struggling to respond to this business expectation regarding the use of the latest unified communications and collaboration (UCC) technologies, including messaging applications.

Many Instant Message systems are not designed with security features in mind. Those who utilize IM as a means of electronic communication may be unaware that revealing confidential information over an unsecured delivery channel could expose it to interception by unintended receivers. Personal or private information received by IM is not authenticated; chat sessions can be hijacked and users can be impersonated.

Unified enterprise communication solutions like SharePoint and Lync could also be not practical for all enterprises. While Microsoft's Lync UC platform's collaboration features fit well into some businesses as a voice and video solution, it can be just too inconvenient to set it up effectively and maintain for a more productive and agile workforce and for smaller enterprises. Alternatives like Microsoft’s services Yammer (enterprise social network that helps employees collaborate across departments, locations and business apps) and SharePoint (Web application framework and platform) are available, but the problem is the rate of adoption on these services is extremely low.

According to a report from Forrester (News - Alert), which uses data from the August 2012 Global SharePoint Usage Online Survey to analyze the current and likely future state of SharePoint adoption in enterprises, 54 percent of businesses said they do not see the level of adoption they expected, while 51 percent said users just don’t like the SharePoint experience.

Nevertheless, some organizations are using this technology to improve the efficiency and decision-making power of their employees. SharePoint is being used to bring many parties together in one centralized area and is a powerful, secure tool for users to create documents and gather data to share with others (coworkers, clients, management and workgroups). In fact, SharePoint Services technology enables users to communicate effectively and engage in information sharing, within and beyond corporate boundaries. In essence, this apt solution empowers users to cooperate on tasks, and exchange e-mail and instant messages.

In today’s contemporary workplace, collaboration must take various forms – from instant messaging and audio- and video-conferencing to document sharing across multiple locations. Businesses, then, need reliable and secure tools that deliver a predictable experience in a single package that staff will find easy and intuitive to use.

Whether it will be using Microsoft (News - Alert) services (Lync or SharePoint), instant messaging (IM) or other collaborative applications and social business networks to facilitate teamwork, these tools can increase worker productivity and ease communication. The key for companies of all sizes and industries, then, is to find the right Unified Communications (News - Alert) & Collaboration (UCC) services that will fit their business needs.