http://www.forbes.com/2005/07/29/teens-email-habits-cx_ld_0729digilife.html
 This story deals primarily with he waning use of E-mail amongst teens and 
how that may impact future use fo E-mail as these indivisuals rise in age 
and begin comprising a larger portion of the workforce, but the statement I 
found of interst and of potential concern for those of us in RIM was:
 "Corporate users and consumers will swap 14 billion IMs per day worldwide 
this year, a figure that Radicati expects will more than triple to
46.5billion by 2009. The number of free public IM accounts will grow
to
1.1 billion in 2009 from 816 million today, while corporate IM accounts will 
more than double to 126 million in that time frame."
 And what was of even more concern were these statements/predictions:
 "Businesses "see the value of IM and are giving in to users' demands for 
it," says *Teney Takahashi* of the Radicati Group. 
On top of that, Microsoft itself may be helping to marginalize e-mail with 
the upcoming version of Office. It lets teams of people work together in 
real time on documents, which bypasses the need for e-mail altogether. 

It's not likely that IM will ever replace e-mail, simply because the latter 
is such an ingrained part of daily business life and because the lack of IM 
standards and protocols inhibit interoperability between different systems."
 What this indicates is a STRONG URGENCY for developing the "IM standards 
and protocols" to ensure sufficent capture of records that are generated in 
this manner, especially if we're expecting to see more businesses adopt it's 
use and the possibility of a twofold increase in IM accounts in business 
over the coming 4 years.
 Many companies have a policy prohibiting the use of IM for business 
purposes, but if these policies begin to shift, it will be necessary to 
develop procedures for capture, management and retention of IM as record 
where applicable.
 Larry

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