Enjoy seamless collaboration with team instant messaging software

With so much information shared during the workday, you need flexible solutions that enable effective collaboration without feeling slowed down. While VoIP phone systems, email, and video conferencing are critical solutions that enable collaboration, employees around the world have also been leveraging another useful tool to share information — instant messaging solutions.

Instant messaging apps are designed to help you communicate quickly, collaborate on-demand or asynchronously, and share important information at the click of a button.

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Enjoy seamless collaboration with team instant messaging software

What are the advantages of instant messaging?

Instant messaging has always been essential for connecting with people around the world in real time. But it’s particularly more relevant in the era of flexible work, as employees are now dispersed across different time zones and countries, as well as unique offices and remote workspaces.

Beyond connecting distributed teams, instant messaging applications provide a number of tangible business benefits, including:

Streamlined communication

Gone are the days where you need to make a phone call, set a video meeting, or type up an email just to share a piece of information — just send the info over chat and the person can get to it when they can.

Enhanced collaboration

Seamlessly communicate, co-author documents, and share media such as files, images, videos, and more at the click of a button.

Improved team communication

Create chat channels for different teams and groups for clearer communication and cross-functional alignment. Plus, you can use GIFs, emojis, and more to bring some fun into your daily communications!

Increased productivity

With instant messaging services, you can keep important notes, resources, reminders, and other knickknacks in IM, never losing track of where everything is. You can build your dedicated workspace that’s only visible to you, while still communicating with coworkers in a pinch when you need to get quick access to information.

Zoom Team Chat: instant messaging as a collaboration hub

With a range of cutting-edge features, Zoom Team Chat is more than just a messaging solution — it’s a collaboration hub that helps you get more done.

Not to be confused with in-meeting chat, which is available during Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat is a persistent messaging solution located in the Zoom client. It also seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Zoom communications ecosystem, including our meetings, phone, and whiteboard solutions.

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Deep links

Want to share details directly from the source? You can direct teammates to specific chats and conversations with a shareable link, making information simple and easy to find.
Continuous meeting chat

This feature lets you communicate before, during, and after a meeting by creating a dedicated group chat in Zoom Team Chat for meeting participants. When enabled, in-meeting chats will show up in that group chat as they are sent in the meeting, allowing conversations to continue after a meeting ends.
Status messages

Need to note that you’re at a doctor's appointment? Or that you’re working on a certain project at the moment? Setting a status message is an easy way to share and obtain information across an organization, that way you can know what colleagues are doing during work hours.

FAQs

Instant messaging (IM) is a type of communication where two or more people participate in a real-time conversation, messaging each other back and forth over their computers, tablets, or mobile devices.

To IM, you often use a standalone application or embedded software. IM sessions can occur between two users in a private, separate space, or in a larger channel where multiple parties are in. Usually, instant messaging involves a quick, back-and-forth style of communication — making it unique from email communication. IM’s immediacy feels familiar to in-person conversations, whereas email is meant to reflect the virtual version of writing a letter or sending snail mail.

Instant messaging apps — or clients — come with a handful of features that help you understand when someone is available to talk. You can see whether certain team members are online usually through certain icons or color-coded signals that indicate their presence. As the technology has evolved, many instant messaging solutions offer advanced features such as file transfer, image sharing, note taking, and more.

Texting and instant messaging use different systems and protocols to communicate. To send a text, you must be using a cellular phone service. But you can only send an instant message when connected to the internet.

In previous iterations, instant messaging services required that all participants had to be actively engaging in the conversation or else the IM session would end. However, a text can be sent and received at any time, which makes the service.

Now, almost all instant messaging platforms let you send asynchronous messages — you can send and receive chats whenever you’d like. Moreover, texting and instant messaging are very similar in how they notify users of these messages. When a text or IM message is sent, the recipient is usually alerted with a pop-up window — that either notifies that the message has arrived or contains the message’s contents. The notification is usually accompanied by a distinctive sound too.

First off, start by researching which instant messaging platform is best suited for your needs. While some IM apps are specifically for consumers and others for enterprises, crossovers have occurred. Some instant messaging applications need to be purchased separately, while other IM services come included with existing technology platforms, so you may already have access to a messaging service and not know it.

Zoom Team Chat, for example, comes included with other Zoom products, meaning you already have the instant messaging solution — and its advanced capabilities — right at your fingertips.