Business Instant messenger solutions?

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Shadinn

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 6, 2007
Messages
122
Currently we use Groupwise Messenger for our business instant messaging service. We are moving off Novell and looking for a new product to use. I don't think we have the licenses for Office Communicator and my boss wants something that's free or cheap, business themed and we can host.

Does anyone have any suggestions? What product do you use at work for Instant Messaging?
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
If you have Outlook then Lync should be free.
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O' RLY? any verson of outlook? I'm interested in this, we use Skype right now, but I hate it. Do you need office w/ software assurance or somehting for lnk, or any Outlook license will do?
 
We will be using Exchange 2010 for the email server and Outlook 07 and Outlook 2010 for email clients. I haven't heard about Lync before. So we can use it for free?
 
Shadinn said:
We will be using Exchange 2010 for the email server and Outlook 07 and Outlook 2010 for email clients. I haven't heard about Lync before. So we can use it for free?
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I just checked my volume licnensing sites, have to pay for lync server (well, I looked at SPLA pricing, and there is a cost per lync SAL) doesn't look free to me. We have open volume licenses of office, and exchange server licensed through SPLA.
 
Yea it seems we would need to purchase the lync server license and then the users cal's.
Spark looks interesting.
 
Open Fire + Spark (or any japper supporting IM client. I personally use Pidgin).


I've seen this setup a few times where they integrate it with Active Directory, Can already prepopulate the groups with users and ETC. Pretty powerful product for free!
 
calvinj said:
Open Fire + Spark (or any japper supporting IM client. I personally use Pidgin).


I've seen this setup a few times where they integrate it with Active Directory, Can already prepopulate the groups with users and ETC. Pretty powerful product for free!
Click to expand...

I have also heard good things especially with the integration and the user's client. I'll be testing it out this Spring.
 
calvinj said:
Open Fire + Spark (or any japper supporting IM client. I personally use Pidgin).


I've seen this setup a few times where they integrate it with Active Directory, Can already prepopulate the groups with users and ETC. Pretty powerful product for free!
Click to expand...

Pidgin is what i use as the client also
 
calvinj said:
Open Fire + Spark (or any japper supporting IM client. I personally use Pidgin).


I've seen this setup a few times where they integrate it with Active Directory, Can already prepopulate the groups with users and ETC. Pretty powerful product for free!
Click to expand...
Can't beat openfire, especially with it's AD integration.

It's pretty quick and relatively simple to get up to speed. You can even build end user's contact lists based off of group membership; no muss or fuss with users having to maintain the contact lists themselves.

We use PSI as the client, which may be a problem as development has slowed considerably on it. Still, I know the later versions of PSI support the SRV records necessary to put your IM server anywhere for your domain.
 
We use Openfire + Spark as well because of the AD auth. However our mail server (SmarterMail) now has an integrated Jabber server and is already setup for AD auth as well. So we're probably going to drop our Openfire server and just use our mail servers built in IM server.

We used PSI as the client instead of Spark before. However Spark has some neat features. It does not run well on slower machines. But since 95% of our machines are newer or VDI, it's a non-issue. Plus the latest version of Spark is speedier.
 
I run an openfire server with ldap setup along with Pigin or Spark. Have a java memory leak but not too big of a deal. Just never tried to track it down.

New users are automatically added to groups, deleted users removed. Much better than our old iChat Server even though it ran Jabber.
 
Lync is great, screen sharing is one of my favorite features and you may want to buy two server licenses so you can run an Edge server as well.
 
I have a guy that they run a call center and they use spark / openfire as their chat client. It is AD integrated and they setup the groups via Security Groups in AD. It pre-populates new people removes old people when they leave
 
We use office communicator at work, bonus that it does some Outlook integration so you can see a persons status from Outlook, and it can update your status based on calendar events.
 
We have a client that uses jabberd2 and Spark and we have several issues with it (deleting a Jabber user causes duplicate messages to be sent out to everyone, group memberships don't populate for some users, etc). Too much hassle, in my opinion.

Internally, we use Lync 2010 and it has been quite enjoyable to use.
 
Doesn't help the OP but for us Google Apps users Gtalk works great - especially on our mobile phones.
 
I use openfire for an XMPP server for an event I do once per year. We generally have about 100 people online concurrently. No problems at all. It works great and you can't beat the price.
 
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