Now that you are familiar with how e-mail can enhance business communications on the Internet, you'll want to consider the options for providing synchronous communications tools on your intranet. Synchronous methods of communicating allow two or more users to maintain an open channel through which information can be sent and received in real-time; that is, with no significant time delay. Talking on the telephone, for example, is a synchronous means of communication. Writing, listening, or interacting with others in real-time adds a valuable dimension to business communication. Users can save time, reduce travel expenses, and better communicate complicated ideas in real-time. While information can be easily misunderstood when it is sent over e-mail, real-time communication enables users to provide context for the information they are transmitting and answer questions as they arise.
Several alternatives will be presented in the next three chapters: WebChat, Internet phones, and video-conferencing over the Internet. Chat is the simplest of the three tools. Although it originated as a text-only means of communicating, Chat tools now support graphics and hypertext links. Applications for making phone calls or conducting video conferences via the Internet enable audio and video in real-time; however, they also consume enormous amounts of bandwidth. Because of its relatively low bandwidth requirements, consider Chat a practical intermediate tool for facilitating synchronous communication among groups of employees and customers.
On the Internet, the two most popular chat tools are Multiuser Dungeons (MUDs) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). While MUDs often add game components in addition to Chat, IRC is a pure chat system. IRC's main network often has more than 10,000 users online at any given time. On average, there are about 18,000 users and 5,000 channels on IRC worldwide. IRC was designed as a replacement for the rudimentary UNIX talk function, which enabled two people to converse in text in real-time over the Internet. As talk's successor, IRC made it possible for multiple users to converse in text using a shared channel on the Internet.
Chat, as the name implies, originated as a playful means of communicating with other users around the world in real-time over the Internet. It first gained international recognition during the Persian Gulf War, when updates from around the world were sent over the wire to individuals who had tuned in to one channel on the Internet Relay Network. This ability to communicate real-time news feeds also was used in the following global events:
The 1994 California Earthquake
The 1993 Russian Revolt
The 1992 Russian Revolution
The 1992 USA Presidential Election
The 1991 Gulf War
The excerpts below are from a log of a chat that took place on IRC during the Gulf War (source: http://urth.acsu.buffalo.edu/irc/WWW/ircdocs.html#logs):
This is IRC CHANNEL +peace ( till ca. Jan 17 02:22 ) ( jnweiger@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de ) IRC Log started Thu Jan 17 01:03 <umfonta6> bombs are droppiong in baghdad <hstanley> jeesh <spamgod> am i getting through? <CaptainJ> CNN HAS THE SCOOP! <umfonta6> cbc <Lipstick> Wow! why is everyone leaving? ... <Goofa> Operation desert storm{_ has started. <CaptainJ> OPERATION DESERT STORM <Anipa> operation Thunderstorm!!! <tsh> liberation...hah... <MistDrake> Announcement from the president of US: The liberation of Kuwait has begun <Arkie> i'm listening to nbc radio.... <Starhawk> "Desert Storm" <Lipstick> Operation desert storm has begun as of 7pm! <Mark> we knew an hour ago.
After IRC began to gain popularity, a group of commercial IRC client products emerged and helped standardize the slash commands used to communicate on IRC. Consumer online services, such as America Online, also began offering chat groups to subscribers. By some estimates, chat services account for approximately 30 percent of the revenues earned by these services.
More recently, Chat has become a feasible business communication tool as companies such as Netscape and Microsoft integrate the chat feature directly into their Web browsers. This new relationship between the browser and the chat client allows casual Web users to take advantage of Chat without leaving the Web environment. As Java-enabled browsers become more prevalent, applet-based chat services will become more common. 3D chat enabled by VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) may appeal to some businesses as a means of enhancing the customer's shopping experience by providing 3D views of their products. In 3D chat, channels become virtual spaces that the user can explore. Users can personalize an avatar to represent themselves in this virtual space. The avatar can communicate basic chat expressions such as a grin with simple animations. Because of the bandwidth required to simulate 3D space, the high-speed intranet environment provides a fertile proving ground for this emerging technology.
To use Chat, the user runs a client program, which connects to either the IRC network or the company's own server. Servers then pass messages from user to user over the Chat network. The IRC servers can have hundreds of channels. Once connected, the user lists all the channels, scrolls through the list to find a topic of interest, and joins that channel. Once the user joins a channel, anything the user types can be read by the other channel members. It is possible to page other users who are in different channels, and to talk to a user privately by using the /msg command. Other IRC slash commands allow users to express behaviors, for example hug and smile. Business users will most likely begin using one of the graphical user interfaces to IRC and therefore will not need to learn the commands; however, typing /HELP will usually assist in finding information about specific commands.
Today's chat tools simplify the chat process just described into a graphical interface that makes the underlying commands transparent to the user.
Until very recently, Chat has been presented as a feature primarily for enhancing consumer entertainment on the Internet. Few businesses actually depend on a chat system in the intranet environment. Nevertheless, WebChat does lend itself to a variety of business communication applications. The first example of a business application for WebChat serves as a bridge between the consumer environment and the internal business environment. On the most basic level, companies can build the chat function into their corporate Web site to allow public visitors to join a chat group in which particular product information from the company is being discussed. A sales representative from the company moderates the chat room to answer questions and direct users to other relevant Web pages. Chat is practical for handling customer questions because it allows a sales representative to provide information to customers in real-time and to stimulate discussion among customers. As moderator of the chat session, the sales rep will have a significant, new opportunity to measure and influence customer satisfaction.
Within the corporation, WebChat is a particularly useful tool for group settings that require discussion, answers, or feedback in real-time. Companies might choose to use intranet Chat to hold text-based conference calls with remote employees, or to conduct employee training sessions. A remote sales representative can routinely brief the employers located at the company's headquarters on meetings with clients. The ability to transmit and respond to competitive information in real-time can play an important role in winning new accounts or keeping existing clients. Chat would also be good for brainstorming among design engineers or problem solving between people who have experience with similar equipment. Unlike video-conferencing or an Internet phone conference call, WebChat provides an open channel for group communication in real-time without consuming excess bandwidth that might be needed for other network applications.
In another scenario, customer support agents might use Chat to communicate questions and answers to other agents in real-time, while they are talking with customers on the telephone. Because Chat is text-based, customers will not even need to know that the agent with whom they are speaking is typing questions and receiving answers in real-time. The process of answering customer questions can go more smoothly, and the chat system can save considerable amounts of time for both the customer and the help desk.
Consider these additional examples of how Quarterdeck's Global Stage customers are applying chat functions (the scenarios were found on Quarterdeck's chat product Web site-http://www.qdeck.com/chat/):
These examples can be extrapolated to apply to business scenarios in which users facilitate business discussion groups, sales support, technical support, and slide presentations by using WebChat. A Human Resources department could open a chat room to discuss employee ideas regarding the formation of a new policy, take questions regarding health care changes, or take queries about the company's policy on sexual harassment, smoking, benefits, or hiring practices. The applications just described suggest that WebChat is a useful tool for saving time, reducing travel expenses for on-site visits, and enhancing employee training methods. Currently, Chat is probably the most practical tool for implementing real-time communications functionality within the intranet.
Businesses that plan to use Chat extensively may want to provide a server internally for Chat. In contrast to the IRC network, commercial chat servers are normally stand-alone. This means that when you want to chat on a certain channel, you connect directly to the server that carries that channel, as opposed to joining a server and then listing all of the channels on that server. Currently, few companies offer commercial WebChat products for the business environment. However, as the chat functions are increasingly supported by the most popular Web browsers, the availability of chat functionality should increase. Chat provides the real-time interactivity that static Web pages traditionally lack.
To meet the needs of commercial organizations that want to manage their own chat events, a company called Prospero (now Quarterdeck) developed the Global Stage IRC chat server (http://www.globalchat.com/). This server extends the basic IRC functionality to include these features:
Quarterdeck offers several different versions of its chat servers. The Café version is provided free of charge for small sites and not-for-profit sites. The company recommends using this version to learn more about chat before purchasing one of the more enhanced versions. The Theater version is intended for sites that have a limited budget and plan to conduct infrequent or occasional chat sessions with a relatively small user base. The Stadium is the company's high-end version intended for sites that have a large user base and are seeking to attract up to hundreds of users to special chat events. Businesses that want to hold members-only chat or offer real-time multimedia advertising during the chat should look into this product. Quarterdeck provides the following summary of its specific chat server features:
The Café Version
The Theater Version
Everything the Café offers, plus
The Stadium
Everything the Theater offers, plus
More recently, a company called iChat has introduced its ROOMS (Real-time Object-Oriented Multimedia Server) component that works with standard Web servers to link specific text within a chat to a particular Web page. A plug-in also is available for Windows 95 and Windows NT, and iChat has a stand-alone product for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT. The price range depends on the number of users. A 20-user license for iChat begins at around $495, while a 100-user license is approximately $2,995; a 5,000-user license runs about $19,995. For an additional 25 percent charge, customers can get free server upgrades for a year. For connectivity, the iChat server uses the Telnet protocol; for integration with the Web, it uses HTML.
Users need to have IRC clients to connect to the IRC network of chat groups. Clients are available for both the PC and Macintosh platforms. These client applications can have graphical or command-based user interfaces. Most of the IRC clients use slash commands, such as /JOIN #chatzone to join, /LEAVE to leave, /QUIT to quit, and /HELP to ask for help. However, as mentioned previously, in the Web environment, most of these commands have been replaced by a graphical interface.
Ircle is one application for using IRC on the Macintosh. Ircle is a small but full-featured IRC client that recognizes most of the common IRC commands. Ircle also has some extra functions not found in clients on other platforms. For example, it implements pictures of people online and speech, if Apple Speech Manager is installed. It is capable of transferring files to other IRC users, even if the other users are on other hardware platforms. Ircle is a relatively stable program that requires little memory to run. It is compatible with all Macintoshes and requires System 7.0 or higher with MacTCP installed. Ircle will work with black-and-white monitors, but the company recommends a color monitor. Ircle currently needs only 450KB of RAM.
In June 1995, Prospero Systems released the Global Chat client as the first software to add live interaction to the Web. The product was designed to offer the Internet the same types of social chat and live special events that users find appealing on commercial online services. Global Chat works automatically and continuously like a radio or television receiver. It can also add graphics and sound to the text-only chats available to commercial online subscribers. After the user downloads the client, clicking on a link from a Web page will enable the user to enter a chat channel. The software opens a new window containing the ongoing chat, along with any graphics and sounds being transmitted. The Global Chat program is compatible with existing IRC servers, as well as the company's own Global Stage servers.
iChat is another of the few companies offering chat products that are completely integrated with the Web. As mentioned earlier, its plug-ins for Netscape and Internet Explorer enable users to structure chat rooms that correspond with Web pages. The company's client combines a basic Telnet client with enhanced features to support MUDs and IRC. The IRC and MUD components of iChat's client provide graphical user interfaces to these two chat systems, which help new users to learn and use these existing Internet resources. The iChat client also provides in-line HTML parsing. This allows hyperlinks and other HTML tags to be added into IRC, MUDs, and other Telnet sessions. The iChat client calls Netscape or Mosaic to launch the hyperlinked URLs automatically. Basically, iChat's products enable users to combine the graphical features of the Web with the real-time features of Chat. Suppose your intranet needs to involve real-time chat about images or text. A Web page could be created with the content in question provided, as well as a link to a chat room. Now users of the intranet can look at a Web page and discuss it in real time with other users.
Because it is text-based, Chat may be the most realistic near-term solution for providing real-time communication capabilities over your intranet. Its lower bandwidth requirements make it infinitely more scalable than audio or video, so you can support many more users on one chat channel than on an Internet phone conference call or a video conference. You don't need any additional hardware to support Chat. Chat does have its own technological limitations, however. It is possible, for example, to interrupt a conversation by flooding the channel with text. If one user attempts to send too much text to another chat participant with a slow modem, the session can be terminated by the overflow of data.
Another problem with intranet chat is its potential to put extremely sensitive information at risk to outsiders. If someone unknowingly enters a chat session, he or she will have easy access to all the information that is "spoken" by the authenticated chat room members. Therefore, it's important to establish a secure protocol and procedure for your intranet's chat users. At this point, it's best that users not discuss top-secret projects during a Web chat session. All users should know this, and those who break the rules of confidentiality should have chat privileges revoked.
One alternative to establishing hard-handed protocols is to develop a means of encrypting chat data as it travels from one machine to another. A standard encryption procedure would work, because intranet chat data is the same as any other data that traverses an intranet, and it can be manipulated in the same way you would manipulate, say, a more static message board. What all this boils down to is that intranet chat can be considered a security risk-but not any more so than other applications you might choose to run. If you've taken the necessary precautions in developing your intranet, data from chat areas will be as safe as data from any other appli-cation.
WebChat enables employees to explore a text-based method of real-time communication, while reserving excess bandwidth for other intranet applications. In choosing a chat product, intranet architects should evaluate whether the product is easy to navigate for the user and whether it supports open systems for the system administrator. The chat functions bundled by server software companies, such as Netscape and Microsoft, meet these criteria. Although Internet phones and video-conferencing will be positioned as more sophisticated Internet communications tools, Chat is a valuable means that can be used now to facilitate synchronous communication within a corporation.