My teenage son uses instant messaging almost exclusively to "talk" with his friends. Once the PC is turned on it’s quicker to send text messages on the PC than email or telephone.

Once I started looking into it, I realised that it’s widely used in business and will reportedly overtake email for internal use in the near future. And most likely all your PC’s already have some form of IM software.

Microsoft offers 10 Tips for Using Instant Messaging for Business: "Find out why Instant Messaging is a great tool for distributing to quick information about a project’s status, meeting times, or a person’s
whereabouts."

But IM needs some rules if used in a business: here’s 10 Rules

And there are many compliance issues including record retention, confidentiality and privacy.

SearchCIO.com has some good articles on practical uses and IEC has technical information on issues such as viruses.

And if you want to know what the abbreviations mean, here’s a dictionary.