On Tue, 8 May 2001, Kevin Gannon wrote:
It's a feature of how free services work.
i think sean was really interested in if/how people are using those AIM/YM things. we are pretty heavily dependent upon realtime chat (for the reasons kevin outlines below) but would never even joke about using AIM/YM for senstive information w/i our organization. well, ok, we do *joke* about it. ;)
I know that one household name in IT uses an internal chat server to allow there 2nd line support get access to there 3rd line people. Basically it means they have instant access to all the heavy hitters in a non-intrusive way.
this is what we do, except that we have our entire staff, from our office assistant to the owner of the company on one irc channel on a private server. it's indespensible! as a matter of fact, people are chastized for not paying attention to it, because it is the PRIMARY means of communication w/i the company. of course, we have less than 10 people active at any given time, so it's not too unruley.
It works a dream as a customer I can get access via the 2nd line to 3rd line folk that want to answer questions. Rather than the
we have been running a beta of a java-type thing to irc (i don't know the details) for customers to talk directly with support staff. it IS a dream, they love it. i rejected using AIM/YM for customer relations, too. we don't let them send passwords via email, and certainly wouldn't let them send them across aol's and yahoo's networks. so for us, it's a matter of not allowing proprietary information off of our own servers that makes us reject those programs. deeann m.m. mikula network administrator telerama internet -- http://www.telerama.com abuse@telerama.com/spam@telerama.com 1.877.688.3200x501