A Corporate Chaperon For Instant Messaging

by Marvin Pyles

Continued from [ page 1 ]

Liker says Craig-Hallum first investigated IM solutions a year and a half ago, but the cost and the lack of regulations at the time led the company to put off the project. Once regulation was pending, however, Liker reinitiated the search.

"My compliance officer and I decided to look for a product that not only saved instant messages, but made [public IM clients] secure,"says Liker.

After investigating several gateway products, the company chose Akonix L7 Enterprise 2.0, in part because the gateway is "very transparent to users," according to Liker.

L7 Enterprise provides corporations with a secure way to control all IM usage on the four most popular IM clients (AOL, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ). Users can't bypass the L7 gateway, which sits behind the firewall and records/archives all IM conversations in real-time. The software starts at $5,000 for up to 50 users, and each instance of the L7 gateway is said to monitor up to 20,000 simultaneous users. Akonix also offers subscriptions starting at $2,250 per year.

All IM usage at Craig-Hallum now goes through L7 Enterprise. Liker says employees can choose any current version of the "big three" clients: AOL, MSN or Yahoo. Older versions of these clients have been removed to eliminate possible security vulnerabilities. Lesser-known clients aren't allowed, and L7 can be customized to disable specific IM clients to enforce this policy.

Integrating through Active Directory, LDAP or other corporate directories, L7 can automatically map an employee's IM screen name to the user's corporate directory identification. When IM correspondents are recognized to be within the corporate network, L7 routes the messages locally rather than on the public network.

Using Aknonix's Policy Wizard, inappropriate words can be blocked from being sent to other IM users. If a policy is broken, the user's ID and the words actually typed are recorded in a log. The user is also sent a customizable warning message regarding the inappropriate usage, and L7 allows administrators to terminate IM use by ID. In addition, policies can be created to prevent point-to-point file transfers of documents, audio, images and other file types.

Akonix's report module provides out-of-the-box and customizable reports. These reports can be scheduled to run at predefined times and sent to administrators via email or uploaded to a file server. Liker of Craig-Hallum says he and his staff review reports that detail IM usage by ID, policy violations (such as offensive language) and use by specific IM clients. Liker says the reports are valuable because they enable his staff to do spot checks to ensure that employees are following company guidelines.

"Everything typed and sent through an IM client is recorded and dumped in a database," he explains. "Basic reports show all IM activity for everybody. The [daily] reports contain about 80 pages, but our compliance officer reviews a sample of maybe 30 pages or so to make sure that employees are following guidelines with their IM conversations."

In the years ahead, many expect IM to be embedded in commonly used applications such as word processing programs, portals and enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM. If this happens, "IM will eventually replace email," Shapiro of Akonix predicts, "but the IM will have email functionality embedded in the form of offline messaging."

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