Effusia Blog

Today we’re releasing Effusia Version 4.4.2. We’ve made several significant updates in this release:

1. Added support for non-latin language characters
2. Increased Offline Messaging performance
3. Improved stability and performance for the Effusia Console

Non-Latin Character Support

Prior to v4.4.2, many non-Latin characters were not well supported in the auditing & reporting features of the Effusia Server Administration Application. Messages were saved to the message history but non-Latin characters would often display incorrectly. In 4.4.2 we’ve updated the Admin Application to fully support UTF-8 encoding of all characters in the Unicode set for reporting and searching of messages. If your business uses non-latin characters, we highly recommend 4.4.2. As you can see in the image to the right, the Effusia Console also supports Unicode characters as well.

Offline Messaging Performance

Effusia 4.4.2 includes a set of back-end changes within the Effusia server which greatly improve the performance of Offline Messaging. If your organization makes extensive use of Offline Messages directly or sends MemoMessages to users who may not be online, these improvements will mean much faster message delivery. The performance increases will be especially noticeable when sending MemoMessages to a set of online users and a set of offline users. The online users now get priority in message delivery so they will see the MemoMessage instantaneously.

Effusia Console Improvements

We’ve received comments from a small set of customers regarding isloated occasional lock ups in the Effusia Console. Because we want to ensure that every customer has a great experience with Effusia, we decided to delve deep into the internals of the Effusia Console and do extensive testing to find anything that might be causing these issues. In 4.4.2, we’ve made a number of tweaks under the hood to resolve a handful of potential issues discovered in our testing. If your organization has experienced any locks or other issues with the Effusia Console we highly recommend that you download 4.4.2.

How to get 4.4.2

If you are an active maintenance customer, please login to our customer extranet and download your free upgrade to Effusia 4.4.2. If you’re interested in trying Effusia, download our free trial.

Are you tired of seeing the boring usernames of all your Effusia contacts instead of something more descriptive? Do you wish the contact list said Davey, Scott and Sally instead of dchapel, soaks, and scrawford? Did you know you can change the way your contacts are displayed, both globally or for an individual user? Effusia allows you to globally change how your contacts are displayed. In addition to the default Username display, you can display your contacts by their First Name, their Goes By, Full Name or their Last and First Name. Changing this global setting is simple. On the Effusia Console, select My Effusia -> Settings and select the Contacts tab. On the bottom of the Contacts tab there is a section named Other Options and a drop down box labeled Default contact display: Simply select the way you would like all your contacts to be displayed and click OK.

Now all your contacts will show up the way you configured them to. Your contacts are not just displayed on the contact list though. They are shown using your preference throughout the Effusia Console including all message windows, message history, alerts and any other place contacts names are shown.

In addition to globally changing the way your contacts are displayed, you can also change the way each individual contact is displayed. Setting the contact display for a specific user overrides the global default.

Changing the display for a single user is just as easy as changing it for all users. Simply bring up the contact list and right click on a user in the contact list. From the drop down menu select Edit Contact Display. That will bring up a dialog that allows you to set the specific contact to show as the default global setting, as one of the other standard options or a custom name.

Now dchapel can be “Davey”.

The manila folder seems to always hold something timely and important. On one hand they are used by private investigators to reveal damaging information to clients. I bet Spitzer got one. On the other the folder is used by corporations to circulate important information. Stashed inside the manila folder the memo’s slow path is always the same.

Read memo. Spill coffee on it. Misplace for day. Sign. Pass. Repeat.

Effusia Business Messenger updates this slow distribution network with the memo message. Now users can send memos with Effusia to select individuals or complete groups of employees. Either select My Effusia>Contacts>Send Memo Message to choose individuals or right click on a group (or individual) in the console contact window and select Send Memo Message to send to the whole group (or individual). If the sender sends as Blind instead of Normal all recipients are BCC (blind carbon copy). Regardless of connection status users will receive the message immediately if logged in or as an offline message that appears upon logon to Effusia. And recipients can reply, reply all or forward the message too. Now everyone can be updated simultaneously without waiting for the dreaded manila envelope to make all the rounds through the office.

I hope the next manila folder that reaches my desk is not filled with phone bills or 8×10 glossies but instead has one of those new skinny Apple MacBook Air laptops. And yes Effusia is secure and runs on Mac OSX. But it can’t tell if you are being tailed.

I’ve not used the official AIM client in many years so I haven’t kept up with all its latest features and bloat. The last time I used it, the ads, extra annoying graphics, animations and sounds were just too much of a distraction to make it useful for real and serious communication. This week I spotted that they have included yet another feature that is also more annoying than useful: real-time IM.

“Real-time” meaning as you type ‘a’ they see an ‘a’. I don’t see this feature adding any value unless you are looking to get yourself in trouble. I wouldn’t want to count how many times I have typed things I never intended to send in a heated discussion or how many zillion words I have misspelled until the built in spell checking caught it for me. Everyone would see how terrible of a speller I really am. (Yes, many already know, but I like to keep it as secret as I can.) Having that little bit of a buffer there is the only room you have to proof read an already quick, stream of thought communication medium. How frustrating is it going to be on the recipients end too watching you type, delete, type, type, delete, type, delete, type?

I do see the value in knowing that the other person is typing though. A typing indicator is a feature that has been in many IM clients, Effusia included, for as long as I can remember. It is good to know the person on the other end of your conversation is paying attention to you and still in the conversation but real-time IM is just more bloat. Leave it to public IM clients who cater to teenagers to just keep adding more useless features like this.

So in partnership a partnership with Yahoo and RIM, Jet Blue plans to offer wireless access on their flights. So will this increase productivity and help others pass the time on a coast to coast flight or be a bigger annoyance? I cannot imagine sitting next to someone who is yapping on their Skype the whole trip. And many people that don’t normally bring a laptop aboard now would probably do so now that internet is available. Get ready for your aisle-mate surfing more YouTube and MySpace. There are no cubicle walls to shield you from someone else’s glaring laptop screen for hours on end. For me a flight is my rare chance to catch up on some reading or doing a crossword. Heck, maybe even carry on a conversation. I get enough daily internet intake to tide me over for an 3 hour internetless flight.

With that said we all know it that in-flight internet will be a reality soon.  Regardless, I think internet in the Friendly Skies should be limited to business class.   It would give fliers a choice as to their need for in-flight internet or not. If you allow it in coach then you can add bad digital manners to the already long list of potential nightmare flying personalities.

Just don’t forget to bring a great book for those multi-hour tarmac delays!

A few months ago there was an article that really caught my eye and I am finally getting around to blogging about it. The US Senate was working on a bill that would retroactively grant immunity to e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers and instant-messaging services. Yes, you read that right. Those IMs that you might be sending over the Internet are, and always have been, out in the open. Now the federal government wants direct access to them from your public IM service, no questions asked and regardless of the legality of the request.

Granting public IM services immunity removes the company’s accountability over the privacy of the information you are sending through their network. A request not signed by a judge may just be a request from some government employee abusing the system. Such was the case when Benjamin Robinson, a Departmet of Commerce special agent, used a Department of Homeland Security database to stalk his former girlfriend. How long before we have federal employees committing identity theft, bribery, or any number of crimes with the sensitive data they received from the public IM service you use? It may be going on already since all they had to do was ask.

So if you are still using a public IM system for your company’s internal messaging (and I truly hope you are not), make sure you are not sending out personal information about yourself, others in the company and especially not your own customers. Also, if you are using secure internal IM already, like Effusia, make sure any IM traffic going outside of your network is encrypted by enabling SSL. If you aren’t sure or aren’t sure how to do that, feel free to ask us.

We’re officially announcing the release of Effusia 4.4. The new features in this release reflect the great feedback we’ve received from our customers. I want to thank all our customers that have offered compliments and constructive criticism over the years. Effusia is a better product because of you. So keep it coming and let us know what you think at our Contact Us page. So what’s in store for you with Effusia 4.4?

Quick Reply

We’re very excited about our new Quick Reply feature. Ever needed to ignore a message for a second but you still wanted to respond with a quick “I’m busy right now”? I think every IM user has. Well, Quick Reply makes it easy to setup and send one of a list of canned responses with just a click or a keystroke. All you do is setup some Quick Replies like “I’m on the phone” or “Be with you in a minute” in our Quick Reply editor. (Effusia 4.4 comes with 3 of them conveniently setup for you.) Then when you receive a message you don’t quite have time for, you can send a quick reply by clicking on the little down arrow by the send button and selecting one of your replies. Just pick one and it sends automatically! For those of you out there who like even more efficiency, you can just type Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, etc in the message field and it will send any of your first 9 quick replies.

Quick Reply Menu

Better Message Indicators

If you’ve got a conversation open in Effusia and a new message arrives, it’s always flashed the icon on the conversation window’s task bar button. Some of our customers told us they thought that that wasn’t enough to easily get people’s attention. With that in mind, we’ve enhanced the flashing when a new message is received. Now, the entire task bar button for the conversation will flash to let you know there’s a message waiting. This works well even if you have the “Group similar taskbar buttons” property turned on in Windows. If you have multiple conversations open and they’ve been grouped by Windows into one button, the whole group will flash to let you know there’s a message waiting.

If you like this new stuff, give the rest of our great features a try and download a free trial. For you customers on a maintenance contract out there, we’ll be in touch soon to get you setup with your free upgrade to Effusia 4.4. And keep the comments coming for 4.5!

When we started Liquid in 2001, instant messaging was still a relatively new phenomenon in most office environments. At the time there was much debate in the IT press as well as mainstream media as to whether the inevitable introduction of IM corporate life would help or hurt productivity. As we began to talk with potential customers about Effusia, many managers we spoke with were excited about the potential of the technology but several maintained serious reservations. Of this (generally hardcore) minority, one of the most common concerns was the perceived “interruptiveness” of IM; the feeling being that workers would not be able to complete “real” tasks without having to stop every five minutes to attend to some distracting and unwanted flashing window.

Six years on from these initial conversations, our experiences has been that the fear of IM interruption has decreased dramatically as managers have come around to the idea that the benefits gained from instant communication generally outweigh the downsides. Now, a new paper titled IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication by R. Kelly Garrett from Ohio State and James N. Danziger from UC Irvine casts some academic light on our anecdotal experience of the last several years.

Garrett and Danziger surveyed 912 people who fit their criteria of “computer-using workers” to find out more about how they use (and perceive) IM in the workplace. Their main hypothesis was the somewhat counterintuitive idea that IM users would actually report feeling less interrupted. Turns out, it seems this is true. Though they found that IM users report having just as much work communication as non-IM users, they actually reported fewer interruptions. This is surprising until one starts to think that maybe the features of IM technologies actually empower people to manage interruptions more easily than with other technologies. The authors provide some insight into scenarios we’ve all experienced as IM users:

Nardi and her colleagues (2000) suggest that IM actually provides increased opportunities for negotiating the timing of interactions. From the sender’s point of view, IM provides a relatively unobtrusive way to test availability. The sender does not need to be as concerned about when to initiate communication, because he or she knows that the recipient can ignore or dismiss the IM notification easily or can provide an explicit indication of status quickly (e.g., “I’m busy right now. Can we talk in 15 minutes?”). Although an IM pop-up is disruptive, it is not as distracting as an inopportune telephone call or an unexpected office visit.

And also:

…because the presence awareness functionality provided by IM clients is generally quite limited, ignoring an incoming IM is often socially acceptable. Thus IM offers the recipient “plausible deniability” (Nardi et al., 2000, p. 84), because a non-response might simply mean that the person is away from the computer.

As a member of several IM-using organizations, I can say from experience that this “ping” approach is extremely common. Most of my conversations (both started by me and started by someone else) begin with a simple “there?” message. The great thing about the ping is it allows the receiving party to opt-out of the conversation gracefully. It’s perfectly ok to ignore the ping message for a little bit (but not too long) or respond with a “yes, but busy”. It’s a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that the sender’s desired conversation may not be the most important thing the recipient has going at the moment.

Basically, IM affords users the “power to ignore” in a way that other interactions do not. You can’t pretend not to hear an office-mate’s question as they stand in your doorway as that would be considered very rude. I would also venture to say that we’ve been conditioned our entire lives to pick up a ringing phone. Though it may briefly grab your attention, that blinking window in the corner of your screen can be dismissed in a way an uninvited co-worker cannot. Go forth and use the power to ignore, but do it wisely.

Mobility is the key to my productivity. To be able to work on the go without being connected to a desk is my work environment of choice. And as wireless hotspots become ubiquitous and cell advancements continue to cater to more robust applications office space really symbolizes a TPS report in my opinion. Ah, the freedom of working untethered! And working on the go keeps the creative juices flowing. I do not think the mute grey fabric of a cubicle has ever inspired me. Though the meerkat/groundhog response to stimuli in cubefarms inspired me to win the wack-a-mole game at the fair. But winning a stuffed animal is not the point. Those are sewn overseas with lead paint noses.

All these tech developments help the US convert its workforce to compete in services instead of manufacturing. And distributed workforces allow companies to hire the best talent regardless of location. We have a number of clients that use Effusia to connect far-flung employees and multiple offices. The feedback we get is that their productivity and creativity have both increased. And the communication is secure over the public networks. Of course every great productivity tool has its downside. For me work and not work has become a grey area. Vacation now means responding to emails from the beach and voicemails while you are on the chairlift. Still, it is better than sitting in the office staring at your inbox waiting for that critical message to magically appear. Unless of course you are filleting a fish in your cubicle while you wait.

I’d like to introduce you to our ongoing series of blog posts about using public instant messaging applications in your business. First, let me make clear what I mean when I talk about public IM applications. These are free applications designed for consumers to use on their home computers for quick communication with friends and family. When your kids aren’t texting each other on their phones, they’re using these to communicate. We’re talking about AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, Google Chat and the like. Now, given that we sell a secure business instant messenger and we’re calling this “Public IM Perils” we obviously already have an opinion on this issue. However, we’re not here to throw out a lot of FUD; instead we’d like to give you some things to think about when choosing what’s right for your business (and sometimes that is public IM).

What is social engineering?

Sarah Granger’s article on the subject, Social Engineering Fundamentals, Part 1: Hacker Tactics at Security Focus defines it like so:

…social engineering is generally a hacker’s clever manipulation of the natural human tendency to trust. The hacker’s goal is to obtain information that will allow him/her to gain unauthorized access to a valued system and the information that resides on that system.

So basically social engineering is not about engineering at all, it’s a good old fashioned con. Basically hackers convince people to do something that’s a bad idea for plausible sounding reasons. It’s no different than con artists who get Grandma to pay for a driveway repaving that never happens. It just so happens that social engineering usually involves some kind of technology.

So what does this have to do with Public IM?

One of the first things a social engineer needs to work his magic is access to someone on the inside. Public IM is all about access. With public IM your users can be talking to anyone at any time about anything. As a business owner or IT department you don’t control who’s allowed on the system and you don’t control your user’s contact lists. Even if your users aren’t actively engaging in talking to nefarious outsiders (of course they aren’t!), it’s relatively easy for these outsiders to lookup your users in public directories and contact them. In fact this is how many of the so-called IM viruses actually work. PC world discusses these types of viruses here. A man even lost his job due to one.

What are the risks?

There are two major risks with these types of social engineering attacks: loss of information and actual damage to your internal IT systems. When a social engineering hacker or a virus written by one targets a user, that user may inadvertently give up all sorts of proprietary information that your company doesn’t want released. Not only do most public IM apps permit the transfer of information in the form of messages, they permit file transfers as well. So you’re not just at risk of an employee saying something you’d rather not be said, but that employee could send documents to outsiders as well. As for your IT systems, public IM provides yet another “attack vector” like email. A message with the appropriate wording could convince a user to click on a link which executes a malicious file or takes the user to a dangerous website.

Mitigating the risks

One of the draws of public IM is its openness. It makes it very easy to communicate with people outside your organization. The big caveat is it leaves your users and your company open to social engineering attacks from people who exploit this openness. To combat this, we’d suggest using a secure, internal IM system like Effusia Business Messenger (but you knew we’d say that). If you don’t choose to do that, make sure you’ve educated your users about the risks. Make sure they know the following:

• Don’t click on links sent by unknown people
• Don’t open or download files sent from unknown people
• Don’t send files or privileged information to other users via public IM systems

Bottom line, if you’re using public IM in your business, your users should follow that timeworn motherly advice: “Don’t talk to strangers”.