In praise of the 'smiley face'
"While details of the new client are sketchy at this point, it will likely have a very different look and feel from Yahoo!'s Messenger consumer client. General-purpose instant messaging clients like Messenger are typically geared toward teens and include features that let users include a variety of smiley face icons in their messages or change the appearance of their client with different 'skins.'
"These kinds of features," Fisher continues, "are inappropriate in a corporate environment and probably have contributed to the limited acceptance of instant messaging thus far in the enterprise community, where it is seen as something of a distraction."
Apparently, my esteemed colleague finds something "inappropriate" about smileys and other emoticons for corporate use. And changing one's desktop to appear in a manner to one's liking -- using skins -- is also somehow subcorporate. And, combined, these things are keeping greedy corporations from using instant messaging to their advantage? Give me a break!
I don't believe I have ever met Mr. Fisher, though my impression of the eWeek crew is they don't sit around in starched white shirts and dark suits, as you might expect from the tone of the story. Rather, I'll bet a bunch of them -- like many of us at ZDNet -- use instant messaging as an e-mail and phone call replacement, a sort of text-based intercom. And we use smileys all the time. I also suspect some people have even reskinned their messaging applications, though I can't swear to it. As online businesses go, we're a fairly corporate place.
I am sure there are some stuffed-shirt businesses that would find smileys to be uncorporate, but instant messaging wasn't designed for such humorless people, and they should probably avoid it. But these are exactly the kind of companies that would create their own corporate "skin" to enforce both uniformity and the corporate rah-rah-ness these places confuse with genuine enthusiasm for one's work.
Smileys are important because they add a human face -- bad pun -- to our text-based communication. A smiley is a simple way of adding "only kidding" to a message. Other emoticons add frowns, smirks, and, yes, even elements of sexual harassment (when used improperly). These graphic devices have come into wide use because they expand our language. They give informal written communication some of the same nonverbal cues we use in face-to-face conversation, or even when we detect a smile in someone's voice over the phone. God only knows how many people have saved their jobs or marriages with a carefully placed smiley added "just in case" the reader didn't understand the meaning of the preceding sentence.
Now, the real challenges for corporate instant messages are as follows:
* User administration, specifically creating/managing users and groups. Limiting/opening group access (both inside and outside the corporation) as necessary.
* Lack of interoperability between the instant messaging services.
* Message security.
* Dealing with advertising, whether a company allows or doesn't allow ads as part of the IM clients.
* In some instances, a need for logging all IM traffic to prove regulatory compliance.
There are probably others as well, but as a corporate instant messaging user, these are the ones I am confronted with most often. It is not, for example, terribly easy to get a group set up with instant messaging. First, you have to agree on a service to use (or purchase from outside, but that has its own problems).
Will it be Yahoo!? ICQ? MSN? AOL? Something else? Then you have to download the software, and everyone has to establish an account. Then everyone has to send their personal information to all the other users, who then have to add them one by one to their desktop clients. This is a huge pain and is probably what keeps the number of corporate IM users relatively small.
At least the number of official corporate users. My hunch is there are many more ad hoc corporate IM groups than most people realize and they are proving more valuable to the workplace than anyone has bothered to measure. Tell me about your experiences -- how you use corporate instant messages, its pluses and minuses -- and I will put the best ideas into a future column.
ZDNet News commentator David Coursey is based in Silicon Valley and has covered personal computers, software, and the Internet for more than 20 years. He is an industry analyst and creator of several industry conference events. His Web site is www.coursey.com.