Instant Messaging and Presence

31% of employees use instant messaging with 78% of those users using free software from the Internet

89% of organizations are vulnerable to an array of IM-related legal, compliance, productivity, and security threats

Enterprise Instant Messaging is the capability to transfer text messages in real time over the Internet or a corporate network. Many employees have adopted public instant messaging on their own, which provides little or no security and may be in violation of compliance standards.

Microsoft’s enterprise-ready systems provide highly secure instant messaging that supports information protection and retention policies, such as logging and auditing, in compliance with any regulatory obligations.

Built-in Protection
Organizations must protect company intellectual property from unauthorized access and security threats, and comply with increasingly demanding regulatory requirements. Microsoft Unified Communications offers built-in protective technologies to keep your business moving, reduce spam and viruses, enable confidential communications, and help your company to be compliant.

Anti-virus, Anti-spam Protection
Security attacks often cause business disruptions and increased IT cost and complexity. Office Communications Server provides built-in defenses against virus, spam, and phishing through additional integrated filtering and advanced multi-engine scanning capabilities. New encryption features also help protect the confidentiality of messages in transit.

Compliance
New compliance capabilities help simplify organizational, legal, and regulatory compliance requirements by enabling administrators to easily set policies for filtering, examining, and archiving many forms of communications. Legal discovery is also made easy with powerful cross-box search capability. You can implement compliance needs without sacrificing business processes or end-user productivity.

Presence awareness optimizes employee productivity by correctly identifying where, how and when to reach staff members.

Presence information shown in the context of users' applications allows more intelligent communication choices to be made from within the application.

Presence can be the glue that enables large or dispersed teams to work together. Presence awareness enables people to communicate and collaborate more efficiently by providing automatic status notification and real-time availability of co-workers, partners, and customers.

Office Communications Server and the Office Communicator client provide an immediate, visual representation of a person’s availability or presence.

Find out whether a person is online, on a call, in a meeting, or out of the office. Presence states such as “Do Not Disturb” and custom messages give you more information about a person’s availability. You can also tag a contact to find out when their presence information changes and receive automatic notification when they become available.

Presence not only eliminates delays in communications, it can reduce email and wasted communication by allowing users to choose the right communication mode to reach the person they are looking for.