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Instant messaging has taken off over the past years. Being able to instantly see who is online and getting in touch with them immediately offers direct answers and great business advantages. The problem with many open messenger systems is, well, that they are open! Open to the world, that is. With systems such as MSN, Yahoo and AOL you will never be able to tell who is seeing your communications and, what's more scary, what important information gets outside and what viruses get inside.

Another issue with many of these solutions is that personal contacts are often added, leading in some cases to tremendous personal use and swapping of files.

The solution to this is to use a controlled messenger solution, where you hold the key to account creation and what is possible in terms of file transfers.

A great instant messenger solution is OpenFire from Jive Software. Openfire is an open source instant messaging platform based on XMPP (also known as Jabber), the industry open standard for instant messaging. Openfire includes features such as Active Directory integration and since it uses the XMPP standard, there are many clients available that each offer slightly different functionality. However, Jive Software has also created a client themselves called Spark, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

A Spark plugin is available that allows users to see if contacts are currently on the phone by interfacing with the open source Asterisk PBX, which will be described in the next segment.

For companies with offices in different countries, using a controlled instant messaging solution can bring down overall communication costs significantly, since users tend to prefer instant messaging over the more intrusive phone calls. This adds directly to the bottom line.