The live and interactive nature of instant messaging has made it an indispensable tool for knowledge workers that are heavily collaborating with partners, customers and colleagues, every day.

The use of instant messaging within businesses has seen exponential growth in the past several years. Instant messaging is poised to be the most widely accepted business communication tool to date. However, due to the fact that as a technology, instant messaging was never designed for the enterprise, it has been developed without the much needed emphasis on security, reliability and manageability. On the other hand, early adoption and rapid consumption by consumers has given the technology many enhancements like faster installation, better connectivity, availability and great features - benefits equally valuable for the business user. As a result, instant messaging has spread within the enterprise largely outside the control of enterprise IT policy makers and custodians.

Drawbacks of using free public instant messaging are not restricted to security threats and loss of productivity alone. While they are great for quick one-to-one communication, they lack the features that would be necessary for corporate communication and collaboration. Conversation archiving and logging, real-time data encryption, network traffic monitoring and management are some of the key requirements for an Enterprise Instant Messaging system.

Transplug helps put your business on the Instant Messaging map. Instant messaging allows users to communicate in a manner similar to face-to-face interaction, in that it allows a real-time conversation to take place without the inherent delay of email. Conversations over IM also allow each participant to fully express his or her thoughts in a manner that may not have been possible during a spoken conversation.