A ton of VON

"Many speakers have talked about the "IM generation", kids who have grown up with IM as their primary means of keeping in touch with their friends. There have been repeated references also to the blurring between home and work, and the diffusion of the work environment away from the office. A world of geographically dispersed teams, and collaboration between suppliers, customers and partners. Doesn't anyone see the contradiction here with smart networks of gateways and proxies? A closed enterprise messaging system doesn't let me IM with my customer. My personal professional support often comes from other bloggers and former colleagues who are outside the traditional employee domain. Yahoo IM is a business tool, not a kid's toy. But at Sprint I could only access Yahoo IM via a secret and illegal SOCKS proxy someone had installed in the IT department. Doing real work at work is verboten; your job is to be present, not use presence. The only way to get quick advice from your personal knowledge network was to break corporate security rules. This is horribly broken."