2 English for Information Technology A2-B1 Vocational English Teacher’s Book

• instant 

messaging: while systems such as ICQ 

 

and Microsoft Messenger are going out of 

 

fashion in many countries for social purposes, 

 

such systems are considered very effective for 

 

communication within companies. 

• forums: these enable people to write questions 

 

which are viewable and answerable by anyone 

 

with access to the system. 

• document 

management: this allows documents 

 

to be shared, edited and/or archived by people 

 

with the relevant permissions. They are useful 

 

for storing policies and procedures, sales 

 

literature, specification sheets for products the 

 

company produces and so on. This may also be 

 

associated with a comments feature, which 

 

allows people to make comments about 

 

documents, thus aiding collaboration.  

There may even be a speech-to-text or text-to-

speech capability, allowing the system to accept 

voice input or provide output in spoken form 

respectively. Nowadays, most systems use 

encryption (see Unit 3) to improve security. When 

messages and data are encrypted, even if a hacker 

accesses them, they will not be readable.