Friday, March 24, 2006

IM Culture

Along with new ways of communicating, there will be new do's and don’ts. I personally have more than 100 persons on my IM lists, but I prefer to have most of my private contacts on a separate IM client, namely Live Messenger, and first when Office Communicator implements Spheres as per the RFC's (a.k.a. selective per group availability) will I move them to OC. And why is that you may ask? Well mainly because my family (Including my 79 years old grandmother) has a habit of "disturbing" me during my work time, and my business contacts tends to be more into the IM way of doing things, with only occasional, important and short IM conversations.

Heather Leigh wrote an interesting blog about her opinion on this subject called IM Angst, quote

"What’s the deal with people you have never met before IMing you? This is analogous to interrupting a potentially important conversation (let’s not pretend all of my conversations are important but some of them are...some are even important AND interesting). In my opinion, IMing basically says, “I know you well enough to do this” (among friends) or “this is urgent” (among business associates). I cannot tell you how many times I receive IMs that fall into neither category. When a simple e-mail would suffice, IM is chosen for the immediacy (of the sender) without regard to the time of the receiver."

Suffice to say new habits and cultures will arise. Quickly, if appropriate, moving from e-mail to IM with Office Communicator has certainly lessened the amount of e-mails in my inbox and also moving from IM to phone or video/VoIP conferencing has shortened the amount of time in the IM space for my sake.

2 comments:

Will D. Robinson said...

At Office Dev Conference 2006 this week, Gurdeep Singh Pall (VP of Unified Communications Group at MS) made a similar statement about people receiving inappropriate cell phone calls during important meetings. At two sessions I have attended, he has mentioned the "presence document" which can be ACL'd. I think this is synonymous with what you are referring to as Spheres. The presence document will be available in the next version of Communicator and LCS.

Unknown said...

Hi Will,
Thanks for you comment. You're right on. ACL's is Microsoft’s implementation of Spheres as proposed in the SIMPLE PIDF (Presence Information Data Format, which is work in progress). According to Ed Simnet (Group Product Manager at the same UC Group as Singh Pall), whom I met a couple of weeks ago, they don't like the way it is currently proposed in SIMPLE RPID and they will use the concept of ACL’s instead.