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Group Chat Evolving Into E-Mail 2.0: Page 7 of 8

Accredited Home Lenders is using online chat sessions to provide its loan brokers a secure and reliable means of communicating in real time with loan specialists to resolve issues with loan applications. And Ecreation built a virtual disk jockey for a Dutch radio station that also 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, or SIP, that can be incorporated in many other chat systems, such as Parlano's.

Growing Popularity
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 to their staff and control its adoption across the company. "We get lots of calls from potential customers asking us about group chat about three to four months after they have adopted enterprise IM," said 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 is Active Directory, LDAP, or some other mechanism, and that can take some integration and maintenance work.