Look at what reports are available from the protection systems, and determine if you need particular reports for compliance or other legal reasons. Finally, if you are using these products for security reasons, examine how often they update their exploit signatures. Obviously, the more frequent the updates, the better the protection.

Lotus SameTime

If the thought of having your users communicating on an open, unencrypted, public IM system such as AOL or MSN makes you cringe, then you should think about purchasing one of the private IM systems from either Microsoft or Lotus. While the new AIM Pro client offers encryption (and companies such as Parlano have been offering encrypted add-ons for years), the private systems offer more: You'll get more control over who is talking to whom, you can more easily integrate your IM identity with your existing corporate e-mail and directory servers, and you have monitoring and encryption built in. The downside is that the private IM systems are only just now integrating with the public IM systems, so if you want to communicate with partners and others outside of your internal network, it will take some effort.

Lotus SameTime was one of the first systems to mix a private IM network with support for one of the public networks, in this case AOL. The next release will also support Yahoo and Google Talk, but not MSN. The new version will also extend support to Outlook and Sharepoint users, along with various mobile devices such as BlackBerries and Nokia smart phones.

Pricing for SameTime is US$55 per user. Lotus doesn't charge for the additional connectivity to the public IM networks, webconferencing or telephony integration, unlike Microsoft.