Yahoo! Business Messenger Jumps Into Business IM Fray

Jeff Hester

October 7, 2003

Yahoo quietly released Yahoo! Business Messenger, a new instant messaging product targeted at businesses that need centralized administration, greater messaging security, and integration with other business collaboration tools such as web conferencing.

Employees have been using public IM networks for a long time, sometimes for business, and sometimes just to keep in touch with their friends or family. More recently corporations have begun waking up to the potential value that online awareness and instant messaging can bring their enterprise. But the needs of a corporation usually dictate a higher level of control than offered by the public IM networks most people use at home or school.

Yahoo, recognizing the need for business-class IM has introduced Business Messenger. Their claim is that “your employees are more productive. Projects move foward faster, decisions get made quicker, more work gets done in less time.” All while saving typical phone and network costs.

Here’s what they actually deliver:

• Centralized Administrative Control

  Corporate IT can control user access, directories and even what functions are available.

• Security

  Text messages and file transfers are encrypted. Users are authenticated against your existing directory service (so Joe Somebody can’t pretend to be the CEO).

• Business-Class Tools

  Integration with virus protection, WebEx conferencing and spam control.

• Integrated Logging

  Messages can be centrally logged to maintain compliance with government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Be careful what you say online, someone might be reading.

• Sanctioned Access to a Major Public Network

  Companies can, at their option, allow access to the Yahoo! Messenger network, allowing you to IM associates outside of your corporate network.

• Reliability, Availability, Scalability

  Yahoo’s public IM network is notoriously flakey, but then in a corporate environment, it’s not likely that you’ll see too many 14 years old’s trying to hack accounts, boot users or spam fellow employees. Even the largest corporation would represent a tiny fraction of the total number of users on Yahoo’s public network, so I’ll begrudgingly trust them on this point.

Of course, all of these promises are going to cost you. How much? It depends on the size of your organization, how many licenses you’ll need and how good your company is at negotiating. In other words, it depends. However Yahoo has some handy papers and seminar that will help you calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) at the Business Messenger site.

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