My company just instigated a complete ban on instant messaging clients, supposedly for security reasons. While I agree that instant messaging applications may not be the most secure and probably should not be used internally for sensitive information (for which an internal instant messaging deployment of some sort would be preferable), I feel that instant messaging has become such a commodity for personal communications that removing this privilege is a highly significant and intolerable restriction. Ultimately, this can’t be in the company’s interest either, since a couple of unobstrusive instant messages (for example to keep in touch with the spouse) are now replaced by several phone calls with a lot more overhead.
Time to start looking into web based instant messaging applications, such as WebMessenger…