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Published on: 8/27/2002
Last Visited: 12/14/2002
But with proper training, the productivity enhancements of IM outweigh these concerns," says Michael Becker, Director Product Marketing, Ecrio Inc., a company that provides instant communication application and infrastructure software.
Breaking Down The Walls"Currently, all the IM providers each have their own niche communities and are isolated walled gardens.A critical success factor for the future of any IM service will be the interoperability between services and the extension of them to the wireless networks," says Becker.
"The other thing that IM providers need to do is to extend IM usage beyond the PC experience to the wireless world, including SMS, WAP, and MMS," he adds."Historically, IM has been a PC-to-PC experience, but it is not a far stretch to bring it to the wireless world.SMS has been wildly successful, and it is not all that different from IM.The key difference between the SMS and IM is presence and availability management."
"With SMS, we assume that a user's mobile phone is switched on and that the user is available, but this might not be the case.We have no presence control.
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This control dramatically improves the user experience and enhances next-generation messaging services," Becker elaborates.
IM providers are not slow in realizing this.