Yahoo! Business Messenger is well suited to companies that want to reap the benefits of corporate instant messaging without making significant investments in internal infrastructure. Its architecture relies on J2EE servlets that run behind your firewall. They act as connectors between the Yahoo! enterprise IM client and your corporate IT services; but they don't perform presence management and message routing, which Yahoo! handles in its own data centers. Users of the full-featured Yahoo! Business Messenger—an enhanced version of Yahoo!'s public IM client—can communicate securely with other Yahoo! enterprise client users, including those beyond the firewall, or unencrypted with any member of Yahoo!'s public IM network.

Auditing and Reporting: Optional logging capabilities are implemented via J2EE servlets. If the logging servlet is temporarily unavailable, the client buffers logs until it is able to upload them for permanent storage.

Security: Communications with other Yahoo! Business Messenger users are encrypted with SSL.

IM Features: The enterprise client extends Yahoo! Messenger by including VoIP support and group conferencing, plus integration with WebEx Meeting Center. Yahoo! Business Messenger integrates with Yahoo! accounts so you can link your corporate identity to your personal contact information.

Interoperability and Integration: Clients interoperate with Yahoo!'s public IM network of more than 25 million users.

Management and Administration: Yahoo! hosts its enterprise IM presence and routing services separately from its consumer services and guarantees 99 percent uptime.