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Most businesses now recognise that they would struggle to operate without their messaging systems - email, instant messaging, mobile messaging and other collaborative tools. But they also understand that, like any other business tool, messaging needs to be managed judiciously.

Take the example of a major international leisure group whose online booking service for a newly launched product was brought to a standstill by the unfettered use of email. As its CTO confided to Information Age, the company's CEO started screaming as he watched bookings on its website slow to a crawl, only to discovered that the marketing department at another of the company's divisions had hijacked the shared server to send out hundreds of thousands of promotional emails - without any warning.

As that shows, while users now expect 24/7 messaging capabilities, such services need to be provisioned and managed with due care: email and other messaging systems are potential weak spots in corporate security, as carriers of viruses, spam and phishing attacks; and regulatory compliance considerations have demanded that messages are easily retrievable and that message systems are policy-driven and auditable.

As if this was not enough of a challenge, advances in networking technology are opening up the potential of rich-media and unified messaging, from voice attachments to video messaging - all of which come with their own sets of management issues.

Such a focus on the challenges, however, masks the real reason for embarking on this type of project. New ways of communicating with colleagues, partners and customers promise much greater business efficiency and streamlined business processes.

There is an element of this that remains purely visionary: it will take years before there is widespread adoption of ubiquitous, device-independent unified communications. But the foundations are being laid today.

Gareth Morgan

Deputy editor,

Information Age