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Faster than a telephone call and able to leap oceans in a few mouse clicks, instant messaging quickly became a hit with consumers, and now it's taking the business community by storm. With more than 1 billion instant messages sent over the Internet each day and 3 million users signing up for free public IM services each month, instant messaging is one of the fastest-growing Web-based technologies.

This shouldn't surprise you. IM services offer a downloadable client that is easy to install, simple to use, and packed with a variety of collaboration tools such as file transfer, Web co-browsing, text-to-voice, whiteboarding, and application sharing in addition to pop-up text, voice, and even video communication.

Best of all, the majority of the IM services are free, including Yahoo Messenger, Tribal Voice's PowWow, MSN Messenger, and America Online Instant Messenger, more widely known as AIM.

In business, time is money. Brokerage houses, call centers, the military, and other organizations for which e-mail transmissions have proved to be too slow have embraced instant messaging. Also catching the IM wave are companies that want to provide cost-saving and community-building collaboration among multiple locations, remote employees, and telecommuters.

IM solutions allow you to create and distribute a company-wide buddy list, organized by department or location, to all your employees, letting them know at a glance, and without having to calculate time zone differences, who in the company is online and available to communicate.

With all IM solutions, initiating a chat is as easy as double-clicking a name on your buddy list.

Personalized Messages

As IM service providers release new versions, they are adding not only new functionality to their products but also more personalization features. Tribal Voice PowWow 4.0's release added more choices for sound elements such as message notification and a robot voice for text-to-voice messaging.

Information push is the latest feature to show up in IM clients. Users of AIM and other services can have stock quotes, weather, sports scores, and news automatically piped in to their IM connection via a ticker window. In Yahoo Messenger, you'll find built-in links to news headlines and calendar services. Once again, customization is king, with the user determining the types of information and the frequency of updates.

Working Together

More important to business users, however, are the collaboration capabilities such as co-browsing and whiteboarding that are rapidly being added to IM services' repertoire of functional features.

Co-browsing, in which you remotely control the Web browsers of other IM users, allows you to lead Web tours and conduct Web-based presentations while chatting by text or voice in the background. Whiteboarding also facilitates online meetings. Although the whiteboards of IM services such as PowWow are primitive compared to full-fledged whiteboard applications, they aid collaboration by giving users a central place to present ideas and build on them.

Also handy for business users are the file transfer capabilities provided by AIM, PowWow, and Yahoo Messenger. Peer-to-peer file transfers are fast and convenient, and unlike e-mail they let users know immediately when an important file has been delivered.

Voice chat, which is also provided in AIM, PowWow, and Yahoo Messenger, promises to put a dent in long-distance phone charges, but it's problematic when communicating through firewalls. Nevertheless, having this feature available may keep users from reaching for the phone when the pace of conversation becomes too fast for typing.