Enterprise Instant Messaging Research Articles

Managing Emotion In The Workplace: An Empirical Study With Enterprise Instant Messaging

ABSTRACT Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) has become an increasingly important tool for enterprises to operate efficiently and for the employees to communicate smoothly, especially with the recent outbreak of the pandemic. This means that employers and employees are having to adapt to new ways of working, e.g. teleworking or home-based working, and they could experience emotional stress, irritability and anxiety. However, few studies have used sentiment analysis to help employees manage their emotions and past studies mostly applied retrospective sentiment analysis on user-generated content as such as Twitter or the internal enterprise data. In this study we present an Employee Sentiment Analysis and Management System (ESAMS) that continuously monitors the emotions of the employees in real time by analyzing the conversations so the managerial members and the team members can actively manage their emotions or adjust their actions on the spot. As a proof-of-concept, we use Naïve Bayes as our sentiment classifier and achieve an average classification accuracy of 74%. The ESAMS was pilot-tested for one month by 10 participants, who were later interviewed as part of the evaluation. The results show that the ESAMS was helpful in improving team performance and team management.

Group Chat Ecology in Enterprise Instant Messaging: How Employees Collaborate Through Multi-User Chat Channels on Slack

Despite the long history of studying instant messaging usage, we know very little about how today's people participate in group chat channels and interact with others inside a real-world organization. In this short paper, we aim to update the existing knowledge on how group chat is used in the context of today's organizations. The knowledge is particularly important for the new norm of remote works under the COVID-19 pandemic. We have the privilege of collecting two valuable datasets: a total of 4,300 group chat channels in Slack from an R&D department in a multinational IT company; and a total of 117 groups' performance data. Through qualitative coding of 100 randomly sampled group channels from the 4,300 channels dataset, we identified and reported 9 categories such as Project channels, IT-Support channels, and Event channels. We further defined a feature metric with 21 meta-features (and their derived features) without looking at the message content to depict the group communication style for these group chat channels, with which we successfully trained a machine learning model that can automatically classify a given group channel into one of the 9 categories. In addition to the descriptive data analysis, we illustrated how these communication metrics can be used to analyze team performance. We cross-referenced 117 project teams and their team-based Slack channels and identified 57 teams that appeared in both datasets, then we built a regression model to reveal the relationship between these group communication styles and the project team performance. This work contributes an updated empirical understanding of human-human communication practices within the enterprise setting, and suggests design opportunities for the future of human-AI communication experience.

EIMAKP: Heterogeneous Cross-Domain Authenticated Key Agreement Protocols in the EIM System

In recent years, instant messaging (IM) has increasingly become a popular communication technology around the world, and the enterprise instant messaging (EIM) system is one of IM’s applications for enterprise use. The existing studies of EIM systems are directed at the design of functional components and the process of communication, which are usually based on XMPP protocol suite. However, in this paper, the security of EIM is more concerned from another perspective, which is the problem of identity authentication and key agreement between users and services. Several EIM systems are based on public key infrastructure (PKI) to achieve the high-security requirements of enterprises, while identity-based cryptography (IBC) brings new development direction for EIM systems. Although most of the EIM applications are applied independently in different enterprises, users’ heterogeneous cross-domain service access has become an inevitable trend. However, there is still no heterogeneous cross-domain authentication protocol between the PKI domain and the IBC domain having been proposed. Therefore, in order to address this problem, a novel and detailed heterogeneous cross-domain authenticated key agreement scheme is proposed in this paper. By utilizing the PKI-based distributed trust model and the access authorization tickets, this scheme can realize interconnection and seamless authentication between the PKI domain and the IBC domain. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is theoretically correct, while guaranteeing high security and efficiency.

Continuance use intention of enterprise instant messaging: a knowledge management perspective

Instant messaging has been widely utilised by a variety of types of organisations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of internal communication and knowledge management (KM). To date, though, the continuance use of enterprise instant messaging (EIM) and its impact on KM outcomes have not been well understood in both academia and practice. This paper uses the decomposed theory of planned behaviour to explore factors that influence continual usage of EIM applications within organisations, as well as the impact of the continuance use decisions on knowledge creation, transfer, and retention within organisations. Our results are useful in developing guidelines and strategies to increase the likelihood of the continuance use of EIM and to improve the potential outcome of its use within organisations.

Exploring the Effects of Enterprise Instant Messaging Presence Information on Employee Attendance in a Distributed Workforce

According to John Adams’ equity theory for employee motivation, employees place great importance on relative effort or input to its outcomes at the work place. However, as actual employee productivity is often difficult to estimate, anecdotal evidence suggests that employees frequently tend to compare the average number of hours worked per day. Geographically distributed or mobile workforces are of particular interest because such employees may not easily be able to physically observe their co-workers and, thus, estimate their relative effort. Instant Messaging (IM) has recently been adopted in many workplaces; yet, research on potential effects that IM presence awareness feature may have on employee attendance in a distributed workforce is virtually non-existent. This paper bridges that gap in the literature by presenting relevant findings, which have been derived from a 12-month-long ethnographic study of a large professional services organization. The authors show that, depending on the relative employee power relationship, presence awareness information may have significant positive or negative effects on a range of employee attendance dimensions.

Research and Implement of Enterprise Instant Messaging System for MES

Research and Implement of Enterprise Instant Messaging System for MES

Secure instant messaging in enterprise-like networks

Instant messaging (IM) has been one of most frequently used malware attack vectors due to its popularity. However, previous solutions are ineffective to defend against IM malware in an enterprise-like network environment, mainly because of high false positive rate and the requirement of the IM server being inside the protected network. In this paper, we propose a novel IM malware detection and suppression mechanism, HoneyIM, which guarantees almost zero false positive on detecting and blocking IM malware in an enterprise-like network. The detection of HoneyIM is based on the concept of honeypot. HoneyIM uses decoy accounts to trap IM malware by leveraging malware spreading characteristics. Fed with accurate detection results, the suppression of HoneyIM can conduct a network-wide blocking. In addition, HoneyIM delivers attack information to network administrators in real-time so that system quarantine and recovery can be quickly performed. The core design of HoneyIM is generic, and can be applied to the scenarios that either enterprise IM services or public IM services are used in the protected network. Based on open-source IM client Pidgin and client honeypot Capture, we build a prototype of HoneyIM and validate its efficacy through both simulations and real experiments. Our results show that HoneyIM provides effective protection against IM malware in enterprise-like networks.

Understanding the Determinants of User Acceptance of Enterprise Instant Messaging: An Empirical Study

As modern organizations increasingly depend on information systems (IS) to enhance work productivity and seek new business opportunities, communication effectiveness has become one of the key factors that underlie the effective performance of IS implementations and applications. Instant Messaging (IM) presents a revolution in enterprise communication. As more organizations are findings ways to utilize this near-synchronous computing communication technology to enhance communication effectiveness in the workplace, there is a compelling need to understand the factors that are important for the adoption of enterprise IM. We have developed an integrative model based on constructs of the existing IT adoption models as well as theories on motivation, innovation diffusion, and critical mass. Using responses from 140 intended subjects, we have found the results of survey data support the contentions that perceived usefulness, compatibility, enjoyment, and security are significant predictors of intention to use enterprise IM. Although perceived connectivity did not predict the intention directly, it did indirectly through perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Implications and future research are discussed.

Design and implementation of enterprise instant messaging system of cross-protocol

The environment of enterprise instant messaging application becomes more complicated due to constant amplification of its scale,increasing complexity of its organizational structure and diversity of objects of its interactive information,which poses a severe challenge to the existing enterprise instant messaging platform.Under such background,this paper presented the concept of enterprise instant messaging system of cross-protocol which was based on Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol(XMPP).This paper outlined the development of enterprise instant messaging,introduced XMPP and gave detailed design and implementation of the system,providing enterprise with a good real-time information exchange platform and enhancing enterprise instant messaging reliability,stability and efficiency.

Instant messaging worms propagation simulation and countermeasures

Instant messaging (IM) has become one of the most popular online communication tools among consumer and enterprise IM users. It provides instant message delivery, as well as convenient file transfer services. The increasing popularity and functionalities of IM programs have made it increasingly attractive for attackers, especially for worm writers. IM contact list offers worm an easy way of finding potential victims so that the worm could achieve a surprising spreading speed. This paper first presents our experimental results of simulating IM worm propagation in the logical network defined by IM contact lists, which is reported to be a scale-free network. Then, the existing proposals for detecting and containing IM worm epidemics are discussed. At last, a new algorithm for this purpose is presented, which is based on the observation of the bi-directional nature of IM worm traffic, and its advantages and possible improvements in implementation are analyzed. The simulation results show the proposed algorithm is of significant effect on restricting IM worm propagation.