Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Enterprise IM In response to several different posts, I have seen responses questioning the value of instant messaging as an enterprise tool.  In my mind, it is not a matter of if, but when and this is why (from the Shifted Librarian): "According to a recent America Online (AOL) Teen-Wired survey, 70 percent of teens use the Internet for instant messaging, real-time message exchange, or chat. The number jumps to 83 percent for older teens, ages eighteen to nineteen - 56 percent of them prefer the Internet to the telephone. According to Sheila Tran, a spokesperson for AOL, 'Analysts predict that by 2005, instant messaging will surpass e-mail as the primary way of communicating online.' Teens have led the way. Tran notes that 'from the start, teens had more conversations going at once, used their Buddy Lists more, and were creating a whole new language.' AOL's IM service 'virtually lights up after school. Teens love IM because it allows them to talk to all their friends at once; they even call their friends to say 'go online....' These people are transitioning to the workforce.  You can either formalize the process with security and an enterprise tool with a standard implementation that allows the user to carry on multiple conversations at once while performing related work tasks or they will find their own tools.  By the way, when I was down at Novell a while back, they were using IM for call center communications with their Global Network Operations Center. 3:39:24 PM    comment []

Maturing Government Websites Adam Gaffin, writing for Networld Fusion, voices his frustration with the US District Court in Colorado website: "I went to the Web site of the US District Court in Colorado last week in search of a copy of a ruling by one of its judges on the government's Do Not Call registry. Cool, the ruling was up. But why, oh, why did whoever designed the site feel compelled to put all the navigation in little Java applets? In addition to making people like me wait a couple of moments for the fool things to load, what this means is that this publicly funded site is completely inaccessible to various members of the public. If you've turned Java off, or if you use a browser that doesn't support Java (because, say, you're blind and use Lynx), you cannot navigate the site at all, because the only way to do it is through Java. What makes it particularly stupid is that all the applets do is make the link buttons change colors when you roll your mouse over them. That could be easily replicated (in about two minutes, by a junior high school student) in JavaScript without blocking access to people who don't use Java. Feh. I guess The US District Court in Colorado hasn't heard any cases yet under Section 508 of the Americans With Disabilities Act." Government web developers and product managers need to pay attention to people like Gaffin.  I stil see some of these little flashy things on government websites that have not yet matured. And the Office of the Public Defender in Colorado and Wyoming is caught using a dot org domain.  We have a few of these in Utah as well and we really need to update what were doing.  In my opinion (Al Sherwood is a big advocate of this) government websites need to be using dot gov - no exceptions, except when involved in a group like NGA, NASCIO, etc. that is not a government, but a group of governments working together. 7:14:20 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.