The preferred solution would probably be an internal Jabber/XMPP solution run within and by your own company that you controlled access to so that your communic

The preferred solution would probably be an internal Jabber/XMPP solution run within and by your own company that you controlled access to so that your communications (between employes or customers) don't run through another company and you can develop all sorts of nice little utilities that your employees can interact with through the protocol (like, access to general bug# information through simple queries). I would seriously question the integrity of any serious company's IT department if they just had everyone use AIM (the proprietary branded IM service -- not IM in general).