Whitepaper: An IT manager’s guide to social networking

Social and business networking sites are changing the way people talk online.

Sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo help friends stay in touch while LinkedIn and Plaxo mainly connect business users.

They seem to have come out of nowhere. For example, Facebook had 1m active users in the UK in February 2007. Today, nine months later, it had 7m users. This extraordinary growth is part of the problem.

However, the rise in the popularity of social networking sites has presented IT managers with a new range of problems to deal with. This not only includes the time lost when employees abuse the opportunity to access these sites during work hours, but also includes the hidden threats of viruses, spyware and identity theft. This paper outlines these problems and provides suggestions on how to avoid the pitfalls associated with the social networking boom.