Microsoft is offering developers ActiveX controls and sample code to encourage new tools for its Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 software.

The company is betting that enterprise instant messaging (IM) systems will grow rapidly in popularity. Siebel Systems has been one of the first to integrate LCS into its own offering and Microsoft is hoping to increase the numbers with the new code releases.

In a recent report the Meta Group predicted a radical shift in the way that enterprises use IM. The researchers found that currently email accounts for 80 per cent of electronic communication with IM taking up 20 per cent, but predict that by 2008 the proportions will have exactly reversed.

Neil Laver, head of sales and marketing at Microsoft's UK realtime collaboration group told VNUnet.com he thought that Meta Group was wrong.

"I predict it's going to be faster than that, possibly a lot faster," he said.

"We've got young people entering the marketplace who grew up with IM and are used to conducting multiple conversations as part of their day-to-day functions. As teams get more dispersed it's being adopted by the biggest enterprises as a productivity tool."

He explained that enterprise IM systems differed in crucial ways from consumer IM. All conversations have to be recordable for regulatory compliance and conversations should also be encrypted, since cleartext messages can be easily intercepted.