New Approaches for Structured and Persistent Instant Messaging Conversations: In the Context of Work-Related Environments

Instant messaging (IM) has become extremely popular not just for private communication in the last years. Many organisations use synchronous text messaging as a part of their communication besides email, audio or video channels. Compared to Email, IM has some major advantages and nice characteristics. Real-time-conversations are possible - and not only for two users at the same time. But some possibilities are still not available. On the one hand structured real-time-communication in any way is not possible yet. On the other hand the persistence of all communication data and the potentiality to search for and to find any desired past messages is not existing in user friendly interfaces among various applications, yet. The book shows, what experts think about new functions in order to improve communication and message handling; it turns attention to topic based IM in interaction with persistence of history data and features that help using instant messaging in a more efficient and convenient way especially in the user interface design during a multi-topic chat process and processes of searching for past message content. It concludes with a description of a working prototype.