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October 04, 2005

Looking for reasonable corporate IM solution

I have been a religious user of instant messenger applications for years, and it's been a wonderful customer-support tool as well as a way to chat with customers. Many customers have Yahoo! IM, AOL, or MSN accounts, and we're able to take care of business.

I'd like to outfit all of one customer's staff workstations with IM, mainly to allow "We need to reboot the system" broadcasts as well as Remote Assistance desktop support.

One solution is to just get everybody a Hotmail account, but I don't care for this much: it's hard to manage external accounts, requires the internet, and probably isn't secure enough. So I'm looking for a corporate IM solution.

Microsoft sells the Live Communications Server which looks very full featured, but it's at a crack-induced price of something like $100/user. There is no way I can justify $2500 for IM services internally - I'd use NET SEND first.

So I'm looking for a corporate IM solution for my customer: commercial software is OK, but it can't be this kind of don't-take-us-seriously pricing offered by Microsoft. Some requirements:

I've never spec'd this before, and have only thought about the details for an hour: I invite not only suggestions for products, but bullet points that I might have missed.

Anyone?

Posted by steve at October 4, 2005 04:42 PM

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Tracked on October 4, 2005 06:04 PM

Comments

It seems to me Jabber would be the way to go. I know that a Jabber server can be configured to auth against LDAP (which the DC should be exposing via AD, right?).... all Jabber users configs are stored on the server, you could easily connect to various jabber servers securely using SSL, it's got broadcast support, it's got conferences, about the only thing it doesn't have is MSFT-specific stuff like "Remote Assistance"... but otherwise, it's absolutely stellar for your purpose.

I'm not sure if there's a windows server available that will also do the LDAP stuff, I deployed that all under Linux, but I have to believe *someone's* done that already. :-)

Posted by: Derek at October 4, 2005 07:29 PM

You might give Ipswitch Instant Messenger a look. I'm not sure if it meets absolutely all of your requirements, but I've seen it demoed and its pretty slick.

http://www.ipswitch.com/products/collaboration/instant_messaging.asp

Posted by: Tim Farley at October 5, 2005 08:08 AM

I don't think Jabber is the way to go. We tried that with one of our products, EIOBoard and it did not run so well. It was mostly because we were trying to run JabberD on a windows server. From your specs it looks like you want to run it on a windows server.

We have something that you might be able to work with. It's a little immature right now, for it's a fairly new product addtion. Right now it only works with our In Out Board EIOBoard, but there is no reason why we couldn't develop a stand-alone application version with a lot of the features you want.

Take a look at our product EIOBoard at http://www.eioboard.com, download the application, and play around with the Chat. We already have some of the things you want in our EIOBoard product such as Windows Authentication for the login; and we would be able to port it over to a stand alone chat program.

If you think our way is an option. Let us know and we can work on pricing, timeline, and answer any questions.

I found your blog post from Jerry over at the UAA. He is an EIOBoard customer of ours.

Posted by: Corey Collins at October 6, 2005 11:04 AM

Hi Steve,

I'm a consultant like yourself in Asia. We had a bid for a project previously for an internal IM solution but we never got it due to reasons unknown to us. However, we did finish the R&D process. Please allow me to elaborate:

For platform, we used Debian.
The packages and its dependencies you will need are simply:
1) ejabberd
2) erlang

So if you can get erlang to run on Windows, I don't see why you can't run ejabberd.

Why ejabberd? It is scalable, fault tolerant and supported LDAP w/o any problems. All other jabber implementation at that point in time were giving us alot of headaches when it comes to LDAP. It is also compliant to the newer v2 of jabber protocol.
http://ejabberd.jabber.ru

As for jabberd clients, we used exodus for windows (since all PCs were windows). http://exodus.jabberstudio.org
But I am not sure if it's well maintained nowadays.

I'm not so sure about Remote Desktop assistance but its worth a look for sure. Cheers.

Posted by: Edward Lim at October 9, 2005 09:08 AM

I installed OmniPod for a customer and they love it. Easy setup, low cost, and it even runs in Citrix.

KK

Posted by: Kurt at December 15, 2005 04:03 PM