One of the favorite personal applications of the Internet--instant messaging (IM)--is rapidly gaining popularity in the business world. Total users of IM have exceeded 100 million worldwide, and IM will be used more frequently than email in 2005. Like all other Internet tools, the paramount concerns about this widespread use of IM by millions of corporate employees in their workplaces (estimated to be 70 percent of employees of US companies by this year) are its security, and legal implications and impacts.

The hybrid nature of IM, somewhere between a casual telephone call and a formal email message, may have caused confusion among business organizations, and many organizations still have not established a clear policy for the use of IM in their offices. Literally, IM is a special form of email with instant delivery: a form of written correspondence that creates a written business record, just as email does (although, technically, IM is usually under more centralized control by gateway servers). Consequently, the use of IM in the workplace, whether it is officially adopted by the business or not, can raise a variety of issues and concerns, such as data confidentiality and security, data retention, policy compliance, employee productivity, training, and so on.

This book addresses the challenges that IM brings to the workplace, and provides workable solutions for establishing and enforcing rules and policies that will let corporations maximize the business potential of IM technology. The IM rules summarized in the book as best practices for workplace IM use will help employers keep their organizations out of harm’s way, while giving employees access to a cutting-edge, productivity-enhancing tool.

The book is rather concise and brief. The text is organized into 19 chapters, arranged into seven parts, including a general overview of IM, IM and the law, establishing IM policy, content guidelines for IM, IM retention and deletion strategy, employee education, and regulatory realities. Nine appendices offer some reference materials, such as IM and email policy dos and don’ts, a code of conduct, sample IM and email policies, a sample sexual harassment and discrimination policy, and a glossary. In addition, there are many “real-life e-disaster stories” and sample survey questions, as well as the “Recap and IM Action Plan” at the end of each chapter.

Dedicated only to the legal and policy issues of IM, this book could be a good guide and reference for readers who are either interested in, or currently working on, creating, managing, and maintaining policies and security practices for safe IM communication in the business world.