Everyone's Talking About Group Chat
Going beyond IM, group chat emerges as a real-time collaboration tool for business.
Chat also is a fairly lightweight application. "It isn’t another system or a standalone application that IT needs to train people on or integrate into other systems, or something that I have to force people to use," Jabber’s Saint-Andre says. "It’s a natural way to talk and easy to build on."
One illustration of this is automotive company Reynolds and Reynolds, which uses Jabber servers to monitor the status of its own software at numerous car dealerships around the world. The IT department at Reynolds can quickly see if the software is down and take steps to get it working again.
Accredited Home Lenders is using online chat sessions to provide its loan brokers with a secure and reliable means of communicating in real time with loan specialists to resolve issues about loan applications. And Ecreation built a virtual disk jockey for a Dutch radio station that broadcasts over the Internet, allowing the station to take requests from listeners around the world via Microsoft’s IM network.
Finally, Microsoft is encouraging future developments and interoperability. The company has come out with a new version of its Live Communications Server that can be easily extended by many partners and commercial software vendors to support chat applications. It also supports the Session Initiation Protocol, which can be incorporated in many other chat systems, such as Parlano’s.
GAINING POPULARITY, BUT . . .
With such obvious, myriad benefits, the question arises as to why chat hasn’t become more accepted by business IT departments.
For one, many companies are still stumbling over how to best support IM access for their staff and control its adoption across their businesses. "We get lots of calls from potential customers asking us about group chat about three to four months after they’ve adopted enterprise IM," says Parlano’s Fera. "It helps to have some IM experience before getting into group chat products."
To be effective, online chat programs need to be closely tied to an organization’s directory structure, whether that’s Active Directory, LDAP, or some other mechanism, and that can take some integration and maintenance work.
Companies that haven’t practiced good directory hygiene--pruning terminated employees from their directories, for example--or that don’t have various organizational units reflected in their directory structure will find it rough going to implement effective group chat and IM networks.
Group chat is best implemented as a departmental or project-team pilot, rolled out slowly, and used for a particular purpose. So picking the right project and chat champion is often crucial for its ultimate success.
Finally, there are several different chat approaches that have been taken by the software community: hosted or dedicated servers, threaded discussions or open chat rooms, and support for multiple project teams, file sharing repositories, and news aggregators. IT departments need to understand these approaches before picking the right chat application. (See sidebar, Chat About Group Chat, for help on choosing the right path.)
All told, chat continues to be on the rise, and companies such as Jabber, Jive, Parlano, and Reuters have seen growth spurts in their installed base during the past year, largely because once chat enters a company, it takes hold and grows quickly. Says Parlano’s Fera: "Our application is the first one that they turn on, and the last one that they turn off at night."
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