Office Communication - Chat

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marley1

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What are you guys using for internal/external company wide communication within your company? We use to recommend Spark/Openfire and used that internally.

What are other doing?
 
AIM here... at my old job we ran a Jabber server (that still around?) It was nice, we ran it on the linux platform, but kinda a pain. I wanted a global contact list but they didnt support it back then, so when someone started i had to modify everybodys files. I made a script to copy the files over, but it was still a pain sometimes. Worked well though.
 
We are also using Fonality's HUD software. Chat/Call-Line Status

before we bought our current phone system we were using OCS.
 
We mostly were using jabber (openfire), but since we went shortel for out voip it integrates with OCS so we are in the processing of moving to OCS
 
How is the setup of OCS? Can it be installed right on top of SBS 2008?
 
marley1 said:
What are you guys using for internal/external company wide communication within your company? We use to recommend Spark/Openfire and used that internally.

What are other doing?
Click to expand...
Bingo. That's what I recommend everywhere.
 
marley1 said:
How is the setup of OCS? Can it be installed right on top of SBS 2008?
Click to expand...

I haven't done it on 08 yet, but I do have it running on an SBS 2003 install. Setup could definitely be simpler, but I haven't had to touch it since then. I haven't used the voice/video options, either. Text works great, though.
 
We got tired of Spark and since then we have been using Google Talk through our apps in the Google-managed domain.
 
We too were using Spark, but recently installed OCS. The Outlook/AD tie-in is nice, but it's really a substandard IM system as far as most of our department is concerned. We've had lots of weird problems with it (using Cisco VoIP, it would always crash once you hit 39 callers) and the IM client is almost as good as AIM from 10 years ago.

My biggest pet peeve is IM logging. It puts it in a special folder in your Exchange mailbox for easy, all-in-one communications. However, the logic for creating a new logfile is really weird - if there's a delay in your conversation, it may create a whole new entry, but it will also contain the previously logged messages as well. Other times, closing the window too quickly seems to stop it from logging the message at all. As someone who tends to float right around the mailbox size limit, I also hate the absurdly huge size of the logs. Shooting a quick one line question to someone creates a 30KB log. Combine that with the random new-log stupidity, and a few questions back and forth can turn into several hundred KB worth of logs, whereas a simple plaintext log of the same conversation would probably be a few hundred bytes.
 
In one of my classes last semester we had to setup OCS fully meaning voice and video chat. While the instructions are not straight forward, there are plenty of guides online that got me through the installation easily. As previous mentioned, once its setup, dont think you will need to do many maintenance tasks and mess with the configuration.

We used some 2 megapixel Logitech webcams and the video quality was pretty good, no lag, stable, did its job. The text chat worked just like any other IM client out there so no complaints there. Its a nice system overall and if you have a Active Directory infrastructure I would look into it. But there are many other IM systems out there that can be implemented for free out there.
 
Openfire and JAJC does the job for us but i am going to switch clients, JAJC seems to... well plain and limited and you need to load DLL for things like file sharing.
 
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