Seven Castles

Using MSN at Work

                                      

May 9, 2008

What do you think of using MSN at work? If you are the boss of the company, will you allow your employees to use it at work or you will block the port in the firewall?

 

Using MSN at work for work purpose is perfectly fine. It is especially so if used to communicate with fellow colleagues in different offices and buildings. Some companies use MSN to communicate with their clients because it will save them money on a phone bill.

 

Most companies have monitoring programs. There have been lots of cases where employees have been fired for excessive Internet usage or blogging while on company time. The practice of blocking MSN sounds stupid. I think this concept of MSN usage is similar to phone usages at office. One cannot stop a person from spending too much time chitchatting on the phone. Employees need to be mature enough to manage the usage and to do the right things. Bosses just have to trust their staff. There is no point to block usages as people will only try to find new ways and spend more office-time to beat the system.

 

Some people never use MSN at work, although they are allowed to. It distracts too much and they do not want to MSN while working.

 

Some use MSN at work but they use the Web-version messenger because the boss has blocked off the ports for the installed MSN program on the computer. They will log on and off during the day. The browser-based version of MSN is trés crappy and slow and basic, but it does the job.

 

Some will only let it on by putting the "Away" sign so less people will disturb them during their work time.

 

I have both MSN and QQ on during work. We even use this instead of email to communicate with each other and share the documents.

 

By the way, I have a friend who is a troublemaker and likes playing pranks on the plain dumb by hijacking MSN. He changes his MSN so that his Display Name, Avatar and even his personal message of the day is exactly the same as someone else and then messages another random person in the office with some random requests and that has some hilarious results! Obviously this will only work if they do not spot his email address at the top of the chat window! 

【作者: zhangliping】【访问统计:】【2008年05月9日 星期五 05:20】【注册】【打印】