Communication in large business environments is crucial to the efficiency of teams’ activity. We all have our email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird but sometimes we just need a quick yes/no answer to our questions and don’t want to waste time walking down and forth the entire work area. That’s where the need for a local messenger comes up.

LAN messengers such as those from Yahoo or MSN are probably the first solutions that come into your mind, but there are some serious security downsides to them that, depending on your business size and model, might turn your attention to business messaging software. In this article I am presenting 3 reasons why corporate instant messaging such as OnLAN Messenger software might work better for your business.

 1. Total Administrative Control

Although I don’t dislike MSN or Yahoo! IMs, on the contrary, I believe they’re among the most useful IT developments, I understand their limitations when it comes to enforcing security and company rules with these free LAN messengers. And although some security measures may be applied through the servers in your network, these office communicators sometimes just can’t be fully configured to fit your needs.

Corporate messenger software, on the other hand, most often can be fully customized to fit your server’s operating system.  You can use it to gain complete administrative control over the chosen office communicator and be able to fully enforce your company’s rules.

Above all, secure messaging software is extremely flexible in terms of configuration for security and business rules which can be easily applied on the server application making the rules automatically applicable to all client applications within the network.

2. Messages Encryption

Unlike MSN, Jabber, YM, and ICQ, messages sent across the network with corporate office communicators are encrypted. This feature might prove to be extremely useful, especially if you also use such network messaging software to deal with clients.

For example, if you are in the outsourcing business, your reliability and your client information should be kept secure, that is why you should pay special attention to possible threats that are brought about by common instant messenger services.

 
3. Increased work efficiency

An enterprise messenger doesn’t allow users at the client’s end to shut the program down, it allows sending of offline messages, and message status, delivery, and other message information are logged.

The high level of security reaching the very details of working with a corporate messenger means that everything is recorded and centralized at the server level, nothing is lost and messages confirmation are always received.

To sum up, corporate messenger software may be implemented into your business so as to replace the quick emails function, while remaining totally safe to your business environment.

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Read more free messaging and online communication articles. Copyright © 2008,  www.corpsoft.org all rights reserved. This article was written by Nikolai Fokin, Manager at Corp Soft.

Corp Soft is a private company, founded in 2003, that develops effective and safe software solutions in the area of messaging and online communication.

Working according to the "Simple Corporate Solutions" principle, Corp Soft solutions are based on client-server technology in combination with Peer to Peer networking, and have important functions such as guaranteed message delivery, administration, user groups, instant messaging, offline messages, and message encoding. Devoting special attention to the Microsoft software environment, Corp Soft achieves close integration into existing solutions and services, which are based on it.