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2003 Survivor's Guide to Business Applications: Page 8 of 15

A key component of new groupware products is modularization. Companies are no longer willing to absorb the high cost of a proprietary turnkey solution and will be looking for scalable, reliable low-cost solutions for commodity services such as e-mail. Standards-based products are considered simpler to install and operate and offer a lower TCO, a necessity for IT initiatives in the next several years. These same services will be easily integrated with other traditional groupware functions via Internet standards and will include more comprehensive support for diverse deployment platforms.

Moving to an open-standards, modularized groupware solution also puts the enterprise back in the driver's seat when it comes to decisions on upgrades and deployment platforms.

More than 50 percent of U.S. businesses and 30 percent of non-U.S. businesses use IM, according to Gartner, but less than 1 percent of those businesses are managing their IM environments.

Instant messaging will only increase in popularity over the next year, as employees embrace this alternative to picking up the phone or arranging a meeting. IM is faster than e-mail and can dramatically cut the cost of phone calls when remote offices are located half a country--or half the globe--away.

What will, and must, change is the management of such messaging systems. Customers demand instant access to technical, product and customer support personnel; enterprise employees use IM to contact mobile and nonmobile co-workers. Unmanaged IM is one of the easiest--and most dangerous--ways to fulfill the desire for such instant communication. The threat of viruses, hijacking of resources and misuse of the network skyrockets when a public IM is used within corporate walls. A managed IM solution provides a level of security and the ability to control and audit conversations.

You'll need to manage IM more closely in the coming year, and ISVs are ready and willing to offer you the mechanisms necessary to provide such functionality to customers and employees while they ensure that security, both at a network level and an intellectual level, is not compromised by the use of this technology. AOL's Enterprise AIM provides audit trails and security via your existing authentication infrastructure as well as encryption and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft and Yahoo both expect to have corporate versions of their software available in the first quarter of 2003. The Jabber Software Foundation offers Jabber, an open-source solution providing both servers and clients. Jabber technology can be integrated into custom enterprise applications and addresses security with SSL and PGP.