To save money, organizations are laying off full-time workers and looking to outsource their projects to freelance consultants or independent contractors. From web design to writing web content, there are thousands of freelancers who work from home and own their own contracting businesses. Because these contractors are not technically employees of a business, that business does not have to worry about payroll, benefits such as insurance and retirement, and renting office space.

Because small and large businesses alike are moving to working with more independent contractors (or freelancers) to do their work instead of hiring full-time employees, it is more important than ever to create a secure messaging network to make sure that you are able to communicate with your independent contractors without fear of your data being compromised. This is where Brosix  comes in. Instant messaging with Brosix has several benefits besides a secure connection. With online instead of face-to-face communication, you are able to have your questions instantly answered, instead of waiting for someone to come back to their desk or answer your email.

Additionally, with all the savings from not employing full or part-time employees, the costs of Brosix will seem next to nothing. They offer a per-user payment plan and gives you everything you need to keep in touch with your independent contractors, allowing you to grow your business without having to worry about the security of email or whether or not they will be available by phone.

To read more about how small businesses are saving money with independent contractors, click here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-mon-smalltalk-contractors-feb09,0,7031158.story

Brosix offers a unique Instant Messaging service to companies and organizations that seek for secure and controlled communication over the Internet.

Just go to Brosix.com web site and create your Instant Messenger in a minute. Your Instant Messenger needs servers to operate on the Internet. To make things easier for you, we host your Instant Messaging Network on our optimized servers so you don’t need to worry about server maintenance and configuration.

Upon the registration you get a special build for you of Brosix application and a web control panel.

You give the application to all of your employees, colleagues, customers, partners and whoever you want to communicate with. They install it on their computers and will be able to connect and use Brosix from different places all around the world – your offices (you may have more than one office), people’s homes, airports etc.

If you have Brosix on your laptop, you will be able to use it in the office, will be able to use it when you are at home, will be able to use it when you are in another state or country. All this is possible without configuring your office infrastructure. You don’t need to install and configure anything on your servers as we already deployed all necessary components on our optimized servers. The only thing you need in order to use Brosix is to have an Internet connection on your computers.

This provides great flexibility in the ways Brosix is used and at the same time it keeps all the communication safe as all communication channels are properly encrypted.

The ways you can use Brosix to communicate are:

• Text chat with rich text formatting
• Text conferences
• Voice chat
• Video chat
• File Transfer
• Screen-shot
• Co-Browse
• Whiteboard
• Voice Conference
• Voice Mail
• Screen Sharing

More about each of these can be found at Brosix features.

Now, a few words about the web control panel. It gives you a full control over your Instant Messaging Network.

• Add/remove users. You can disable new user registrations and this way control who is allowed to use your Brosix.
   
• Modify user contact lists and control who can communicate with who.
   
• Enable/disable features of Brosix application for each user. For example, you may allow some users to use File Transfer and disallow them use Video. You can allow others use Video and disallow Voice.

Optimizing communication in your organization is just few clicks away – go to Brosix.com web site, create your Instant Messaging Network in a minute and start using it right away with all rich features and secured communication channels.

Instant messaging is the fastest developing communication tool, and businesses solve issues to make it work in the corporate environment.

When it comes to discussing free public Internet applications, there is no doubt that instant messaging (IM) has been one of the biggest phenomena that have gained widespread popularity and are greatly enjoyed by users. In 2005, 80% of Internet users made use of IM, and the figures keep rising.

According to a recent survey of IM trends in the USA, conducted by AOL, 30% of people prefer instant messaging to phone calls, and 40% make bigger use of it than they do of e-mails.

The popularity of IM solutions is not limited to USA alone. While the technology is very popular in Northern America and Europe, recent reports suggest that IM usage has also been rapidly growing in developing economies like China. The number of registered IM users in the country reached 900 million in the beginning of 2007.

Business has not remained unaffected by the new trend. Almost half of all big international companies are using some form of instant messaging for their daily communication, and it has to be admitted that IM is now a serious corporate IT issue. The reason is clear – instant messaging is faster than e-mail; you can check whether the other person is online and thus avoid a time-wasting e-mail or phone lag. IM can also reduce meeting costs within a company by connecting geographically separate employees by low-cost instant interaction. Employees can use it to exchange information or work together, without the need of organizing or holding meetings.

The only problem that occurs in the use of IM at the workplace is security. When using a free public IM such as ICQ or MSN, companies cannot be protected of unauthorized use, hacker or virus threats. However, a solution has also been found to this problem – specialized corporate instant messengers have been created to better meet the security needs of small businesses and large corporations alike.

One of the best developed enterprise IM is the special solution offered by Brosix. Brosix was founded in 2006 to develop simple, easy-to-use, secure communication tools for home and enterprises. The aim of the company is to provide to organizations innovative secure instant messaging and other Internet technologies without making substantial investments in hardware, software and infrastructure.

So, how does the Brosix instant messenger solve firms’ security issues? It allows clients to create their own business instant messaging networks and organize a complete user selection, which can be managed through an online control panel.

Customers get their own private network hosted on the Brosix servers, and can easily manage it via a web-based Administration Console and have full control on users, contact lists, block users, etc. By having a private network, customers can be sure that only authorized users within that network request their messages, file transfers and chat sessions. Last, but not least, Brosix encrypts all the traffic with a 256-bit key. Instant messages, file transfers, voice/video/text chats, etc. are encrypted and only the recipient users can decrypt and use/see them.

It is therefore clear that business can find and does actually find ways to make place for IM in the highly sensitive business environment. IM has gone corporate, and aims to stay so. 

From multi-user operating systems, through teenage use and into the corporate business environment, instant messengers are here to stay.

We often consider instant messengers to be a very recent invention, mainly because of their widespread popularity over the last few years.

In fact, the beginnings of instant messaging (IM) date as far back as the 1960s, when it was used in multi-user operating systems. Instant messengers are therefore older than the Internet itself.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the technology saw its first great boom. It was mostly young people who used it, but the advantages of the tool were already clearly visible: it was extremely efficient, very cheap as compared to other communication forms, and surprisingly easy to use.

This is the reason why more and more people became fans of instant messaging, and why it is now a preferred communication tool for young and old alike. Recently, IM has been widely used by businesses looking to make communication faster and cost-efficient, especially by companies with big multinational operations that would otherwise require great communication expenses.

However, in order to deal with virus threat, unauthorized use, and security issues, special corporate instant messengers are being developed to cater for the needs of various businesses and organizations.

One of the latest developments in this area is the Brosix Enterprise Instant Messenger. It is a powerful, easy-to-use tool, and an excellent solution for enterprises and individuals that need to improve communications, business productivity, and relationships with partners and customers.

Several main factors make Brosix the preferred choice of both large corporations and small-sized businesses.

First, Brosix ensures complete confidentiality, security, and virus protection. While information exchanged over a public instant messenger can leak to practically anyone, Brosix customers create their own private network, hosted on Brosix servers, and all traffic is encrypted with 256 but keys which only the intended recipient users can decrypt.

Moreover, the solution provides an all-in-one package in order to help customers organize better their business, clients support, and office interaction. Brosix supports not only text messages, but also Whiteboard, Co-Browse, Voice/Video Chat, etc.

Last, but not least, the tool has inexpensive flat-free pricing. The subscription fee for a customer’s network depends on the number of users registered in it. The network capacity is increased in blocks of 10, and can be easily expanded at any time.

SMEs strive to survive the global credit crunch.

It has now been officially acknowledged – the world is facing a serious economic setback; inflation is rising and the future seems unclear. Companies try to react and cut costs accordingly in order to be able to survive the harsh reality. But what can you do if you are not the size of GM and cannot afford to cut 10% of a 40,000-strong workforce? Small and medium-sized businesses seem very limited in terms of the savings that they are able to make.

Not necessarily, a new survey shows. It studied over 200 SMEs around the world, 73% of which stated that they have at least partially managed to cut costs in response to the global financial crisis. Here are some of the conclusions from this survey:

• Increased fuel and commodity costs have affected 80% of the small and medium-sized enterprises and has forced them to change their business practices.
• 73% of the firms have taken countermeasures, such as reducing office premises and introducing flexi hours, hot-desking, and home working.
• As a result, more people prefer to work from home and thus save transport costs.

While home working (also known as ‘telecommuting’) has often been referred to as the future of business, the present economic situation has accelerated the process and a growing number of professionals prefer to stay at home and work from there.

A recent development that has helped this process is the widespread popularity of the so-called ‘enterprise instant messaging’. While phone and e-mail are still preferred means of business communication, instant messengers especially designed to meet the needs of businesses with many telecommuters or remote partners and clients are gaining widespread popularity, as they prove to be faster, cheaper, and more efficient that both phone and e-mail.

Brosix Enterprise Instant Messenger is one of the most popular such solutions that were recently introduced and that a growing number of SMEs are now using. Brosix is a powerful and easy-to-use instant messenger which allows clients to create their own business instant messaging networks and organize a complete user selection which can be managed through an online control panel.

By using a corporate IM such as Brosix, firms can ensure the authenticity of network users and rely on highly secure communication for strict and confidential business purposes – which is indeed the main difference between a business IM and a free public messenger such as ICQ or MSN. Thus, SMEs get an optimized work process with additional features.

Connecting with others via Instant Messaging (IM) is faster, more efficient and less expensive than traditional communication options. You can easily verify who is available online and eliminate downtime. This makes Instant Messengers ideal and necessary business tools.

Using public Instant Messengers like MSN, AOL, ICQ or Yahoo is an opportunity – they are free and still good enough. But there are risks associated with them, because they are not designed to meet security and privacy requirements of the business. These requirements are imposed by the high sensitivity of corporate data. Some of the problems are:

• Confidentiality – Information exchanged over the public IM can leak to anyone globally. Every user can send a file in seconds to another user all over the world.
• Encryption – Unencrypted data sent over the Internet can be intercepted and read by third parties.
• Reduced productivity – Any user can contact you or your colleagues (employees). Generally this is not bad, but such unauthorized contacts decrease people productivity, because they are distracted and spend time in non-business communication. There is no way to manage, authenticate and authorize users that contact your organization people.
• Viruses – Instant Messengers are targets for viruses and spy ware. IM is also widely used to distribute such security threats.

In order to protect the business data many companies usually do one or more of these:

• Restrictions – Prohibit usage of Instant Messaging in corporate networks.
• Block addresses – Corporate networks block the access to certain IP addresses and domains. Companies usually have to block a whole range of IP addresses in order to guarantee that public instant messaging systems will not be used from corporate networks.
• Intranet Instant Messaging – The companies, which want to use Instant Messaging, install and maintain Instant Messaging systems inside their corporate networks. This allows organizations to benefit from some of IM advantages such as fast communication and use collaboration tools.

The real power of Instant Messaging is when it is used in geographically distributed manner. Some employees can be in one office in North America, another group could be in Europe and some people could be traveling. All of them need to communicate easily and secure.

To benefit from the full power of Instant Messaging a company has to use an Instant Messaging that works through the Internet. But maintaining own Instant Messaging infrastructure, which operates in all countries all over the world and considers different network conditions, is a task that is usually hard to deal with. That’s why, according to recent researches, companies do not go and operate their own IM infrastructure.

Another option is the so-called Hosted Instant Messaging.

The Hosted Instant Messaging is very much similar to the web site and dedicated server hosting. A company rents an Instant Messaging network from a provider specialized in the area. The point is that the IM provider could operate multiple IM networks on its servers, but each IM network is isolated from the others. Very much similar with the dedicated server h osting – there are many servers in the data-center, but each of them is isolated from the others.

The key benefits with a Hosted Instant Messaging are:

1. The company benefits from all the advantages of Instant Messaging used on the Internet and its corporate network.
2. The company does not need to manage and maintain complex IM infrastructure.
3. Low costs to operate Instant Messaging.

How to choose a proper Enterprise Instant Messaging provider?

When looking for an Instant Messaging provider a company should consider some important points:

Security – it has two sides

1. Authenticity of users – since we want Instant Messaging for our company, we want to control the user participation in our network. In other words, we don’t want our network to allow intruders to come, join the network and contact the users.
2. Encryption – we are going to use the Instant Messaging from different places all over the world – different countries, airports, shops etc. Our communication will go through many networks. We want to be sure our data is properly encrypted and only the recipient it was sent to can read it.

Configuration and maintenance – we want to spend as less time as possible in maintenance and configuration of our IM network. This is one of the reasons we are going to use a Hosted Instant Messaging. At the same time, the configuration options should be easy to use and powerful enough.

Features – the Instant Messaging has to have a rich set of features. Collaboration features are of a special interest to businesses and organizations. Some of the basic features are: text chat, voice chat and file transfer.

Connectivity – the networks, which the users connect from to the Internet and use the Instant Messenger, may apply different kinds of limits. Public places like airports, shops and Wi-Fi hot spots apply one set of policies for connections to the Internet whereas corporate networks may apply others. The Instant Messenger should be able to connect to the servers and register the user presence status (online, away or busy) in as many network configurations as possible. It should also be able to establish communication channels with the other users in order to exchange files, video and audio.

Communication speed – we need Instant Messaging that works truly in real time. We need text messages delivered fast as well as fast file transfer. This is one of the basic ideas of Instant Messaging – communicate faster.

Cost – the cost to operate and use the Instant Messenger should be clear and well defined. We would like to avoid unexpected expenses.