Is there productivity benefit for users to have a jabber client?

[netlogic]

At this site, we don't allow any users to have any instant messaging software. Do you believe there will be a benefit having an intranet instant messaging client for internal use only? Does your company use them?

[jnorth]

Heck yeah - there are thousands of employees at my job, and though we use IBM's IM system, it definitely is a help. If you have a customer service department dealing with many end users it's also great. Set up groups for different specialties and subject matter expert groups and your other users have an instant resource avaiable to them that is not as intrusive as a phone call or email would be.

My $.02 at least

[craigp84]

Yeah my current place (one of the bigger financials) uses the IBM stuff (Sametime) but is migrating to Jabber. The Jabber client does an awful lot more, it's pretty darn good to be honest.

It's an excellent tool in many ways, and is now central to a lot of worldwide workflows (i.e. end of day procedures, software releases - you can have the DBAs, the SAs, the Operational Personel, the Developers etc. all in a chat, but they can be in multiple chats at once, whereas with conf calls only 1x conference call at a time). It's a good middle ground between the telephone and email.

The only problem (and this is equally true of email) is that it can be over used. It becomes a new hammer, people recognise it's value in one application then come to use it as their weapon of choice in everything they do. We have the same problem with conference calls in my place too so this isn;t really a technology specific thing, just a reflection of the individual's ability to reason :-)

A common gripe in my place is people send you an IM and treat it like a telephone call, expecting you to have acknowledged the work request when you were actually out of the office, and in no position to action the possibly time sensitive request. If they don't follow up on an acknowledgement then the ball's firmly in their court, it has to be :)

-c