Have you had to develop a corporate IM policy? It falls under the heading of our e-mail policy. Any corporate communication, whether between two people inside or outside, has to be archived or stored for regulatory reasons. So we just made it a subset of our e-mail policy, so if [you] use this, everything is being trapped and stored. So that's just the rules of the game. And, you're only supposed to use it appropriately. You're not supposed to swear or send inappropriate fields and that sort of stuff.

And you're not supposed to make dinner arrangements? In the most technical sense of the policy, that would be inappropriate use. But we're not that crazy here. If someone wants to send someone else a grocery list and it's a fraction of 1 percent of what they normally send during the day, that's fine. However, if they're have an ongoing IM conversation where they're talking about sports all day long -- that would probably merit a conversation.

So have you been tracking the amount of IM traffic closely? The people who use it the most are the people who sit on our trade desks because there's so much going on. There are so many positions and streams of data. When they have to chat with somebody, that's the easiest way to construct a chat. So they're the heaviest users. If you went around the rest of the company, I don't think you'd see a lot of IM users.

So do you have corporate IM software or is this commercially available stuff available anywhere on the Internet? You can use any IM tool you want as long as it complies with our ability to archive it. For instance, I don't think GoogleTalk works with IMLogic, so GoogleTalk is not an approved piece of software here for IM.

Do you track which IM applications people download? Yes. I think we know what's sitting on people's desktops.