Ryan Reynolds [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
>2. ICQ, in most cases, is not directly related to employees' work, and
>thus can be considered a waste of company time.
If a company is lucky the information their employees are passing
through icq is not work related. Too often icq is used to chat about
work-related issues; hiring, firing, purchasing, code exchanging, and
all sorts of other stuff that you wouldn't normally want going outside
the firewall.
Even companies concerned enough with industrial espionage to encrypt
their external email sometimes allow icq (through the back door as it
were) never considering that AOL has access to everything and could
easily be mining this rich data for their own purposes.
In my experience most people use instant messaging because their email
is improperly setup. Either they don't have a decent client, or
they're on too many lists, they have no implied privacy, or their
firewalls don't have adequate spam filters. If you're concerned about
workplace efficiency, much less security, find out why your employees
are using icq in the first place before deciding whether to filter it
or not.
Capture a few sessions, you'll see what I mean.
--
Roger Marquis
Roble Systems Consulting
http://www.roble.com/
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