How to choose an enterprise instant messaging system.

If you are a tech savvy business owner or manager, then you have probably heard about the use of instant messaging systems within a company. You are probably wondering, and if you’re not you should be wondering, how an enterprise instant messaging system can help maximize your company, and how you should choose your enterprise instant messaging system. And if you’re not tech savvy, then this article will help you realize that a tool that you thought was just for your adolescent daughter can actually be an extremely powerful business tool that can revolutionize your business. The topic of this article is how to choose the right enterprise instant messaging system for your company.
If you think that Instant Messenging is just for pre-teens and college students, think again. Enterprise Instant Messenging has by growing by about 20% each year. It has now passed email as the online communication choice of business employees. And why is enterprise instant messenging so popular? Well, at IBM, for example, 77% of IBM employees report that enterprise instant messenging has completely transformed the way that they communicate about business matters. If you can instant message, then you don’t have to spend so much time writing emails, listening to voice mails, leaving voice mails, going to meetings, and engaging in face to face conversation. Rather than lamenting the decline of inter personal communication, you should probably embrace enterprise instant messaging as a communication tool that can improve productivity and increase efficiency at your company. That’s why over 80% of employees at IBM report that their job is easier because of instant messaging. Similarly, among the clients of IBM who use enterprise instant messaging, over 75% of those clients report that enterprise instant messaging results in greater productivity.

Enterprise instant messaging is more than simply sending a message. You can send documents, files, data, videos, and photos through instant messaging. You can organize what’s called contextual collaboration in which everyone who works on a project is attached to that project as a live link, so that if anyone has a question they can instantly message someone involved with the project in order to get the answer.
So how should you choose an enterprise instant messaging system for your company? Well, the first thing that you should consider is the compatibility of a particular enterprise instant messaging system with the instant messaging systems of other companies and within your own company. You need to ensure that you choose an enterprise instant messaging system that not only includes seriously strong security tools, but also can integrate seamlessly with the majority of other enterprise instant messaging systems. It’s rather pointless to get an enterprise instant messaging system that no one else can communicate with.
Make sure that you choose an enterprise instant messaging solution that not only has firewalls and encryption, but also has a tool that can confirm the identity of the user based on a corporate directory or something along those lines. You will also want to look for an enterprise instant messaging system that will allow you to decide who will be in your instant messaging network—clients? Partners? Certain departments? You get the idea.
Finally, when choosing an enterprise instant messaging system, you should choose one that has options that will be helpful for your own company. If you deal with graphics, choose one that works well with graphics and will allow you to easily send them. If you work with a lot of reports that are put together by different people, then choose an enterprise instant messaging system that will allow live links in the report. Collaborate a lot with partners? Make extra sure that you choose an enterprise instant messaging system that will integrate with your partners’ systems.

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