Instant Messaging (IM) has spread from the enthusiast, to the mass market, to the workplace. While growing in popularity, there is still some way to go before the software fully meets the needs of users, due to concerns about invasiveness and a lack of integration with other applications. In this talk we give an overview of the challenges and opportunities in making IM a productive tool, and present our work towards these aims.

Integration with email, personal information applications and the rest of the desktop lets users focus on their communication and not the software. We show how this integration can be achieved.

With the growth of IM in business, enterprise IM systems have become available. We discuss the distinctions between enterprise and consumer IM and look at support for enterprise IM on Unix.

Like other forms of electronic communication, IM is becoming subject to legal requirements regarding recording of communications. Ways of meeting these are presented. At the same time, this must be balanced with the individual's privacy. We examine ways in which IM can effectively be made private.

We conclude with a presentation of our work addressing these issues on the Kopete IM client for the KDE desktop.

Will Stephenson is one of the developers of the Kopete instant messaging client for the KDE desktop. He is responsible for instant messaging and personal information management software in his role as the KDE PIM maintainer at SUSE. He has previously presented in this area at the KDE developers' conference in 2004.