Poll: Best IM solution?

[penk]

So say your company has been chugging along without an instant messaging policy. Folks have been using whatever they're comfortable with. This has led to "You're on IRC, I'm on AIM, she's on Gtalk." problems. Things like Pidgin, Colloquy, and Trillian have made it less of an issue, but it would be nice to have SOME policy in place.

Normally, I'd say "Go jabber, run your own server, be happy", but Jabber / GTalk has the fatal flaw (as far as I can tell) of having no chat room / multichat functionality.

So. What would you recommend? The chat room thing is important, but not a deal breaker. Persistent rooms would be nice :)

[Poll #1637469]

Comments

[concrete.livejournal.com]

ejabberd has room support.

[concrete.livejournal.com]

oh yeah and I also wrote a room emulator for AIM.

[penk.livejournal.com]

AIM actually has room support, and most clients support it. It's just a little crunchy.

WRT ejabberd: that's okay, but last time I looked at jabber clients, very few of them supported rooms correctly. Has that changed?

[dsrtao]

Our folks seem to be happy with a mix of Pidgin, Adium, and other random jabber clients.

[penk.livejournal.com]

How well do they handle chat rooms? I'd really like to say "We should go jabber", but I'm edgy about how the clients support the rooms.

[dsrtao]

No problems reported. (And they would be reported to me or my minion.) Windows, Mac and Linux users. ejabberd, running on Debian, with no clear connections allowed -- SSL required. The chat rooms are especially useful for telecommuters.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Huh! That's VERY good. Thank you!

[blk]

You forgot
h) Zephyr! :)

Gtalk does have group chat support. It is, however, only available through the gmail/gtalk interface, which is really not that useful. Jabber is good, but it would require you setting up your own server and having someone run it (which is both good and bad). AIM is what we used in my last group, because it seems to be the most reliable of all of these, and handles group chat pretty well.

In my current dept, we just all run whatever and communicate however we feel like. It's zephyr with some folks, MSN with my officemate, email with my manager, and knock on the door of other folks.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that problem with the Jabber chat rooms is what's been frustrating me. I wasn't sure if gtalk had rooms, but if they're only available through the gtalk / gmail website, that's not nearly as useful :(

(you know... I've never been on zephyr.... :)

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

In my experience, Gtalk rooms also aren't really stable; Skype for multichat has the same issue. AIM works, but the ads are annoying and you need Pidgin or something to get multiple logins. IRC is probably what I'd prefer, especially among geeks.

[blk]

I actually haven't used anything non-pidgin in yeeeeears. So I didn't even know there were ads on AIM! :)

[penk.livejournal.com]

Ditto :) You mean there's an AIM client? From, like, AOL? Huh! Whoddathunkit?

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

If you've already bought into the Office monstrosity, Office Communicator is actually quite nice. Persistent rooms, searchable history available from your Outlook client, integrated phone chat, multichat, visibility into your contacts' outlook calendars from the chat client (ie, am I chatting with someone who is in a meeting?), etc.

[penk.livejournal.com]

We had Office Communicator for a while, and it has some HORRIFIC flaws in it that make it unuseable. First and foremost it is Microsoft only - no linux or mac support except perhaps in very limited form.

Second there are some really painful UI problems. For instance, scroll back a Communicator window so you're back in history. Now alt-tab away so you can type, say, something from the scrollback into another window. OOPS! The scroll jumps back down to the bottom. WTF? :)

Last, communicator is a closed ecosystem. You can't use it with anything else. Most folks have some form of client running already and use that if it's there - having to run 'another' chat client (and in some cases a third) == bleah.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

That is exactly why I prefaced my comment with "if you've already bought in". If you have a community that already is forced to use Outlook on Windows, I like the product for the reasons I listed. I'm not advocating that you use it out of the blue. Also, the two flaws you listed are no longer true: I just checked the scroll/alt-tab problem, and it doesn't happen; also, supposedly, you can add AIM or other chat contacts into Communicator. (I have chosen not to.)

If you don't want people to click the button, or if you just want to yell at them, don't put it on, dude!

[penk.livejournal.com]

No! Clicky! Must!

It's funny, I have to ACKNOWLEDGE that communicator exists. And I'd love to go "Dave, you ignorant slut... Communicator 5.x.21.4-rev6 is AWESOME! and fixes EVERYTHING"

Sorry if that came across as defensive. Durn that only-one-coffee-down-response-mechanism!

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

It's okay, it's just funny, because my office was in this situation a month ago. And everybody still has Trillian installed too, and I expected to LOATHE Communicator, but... actually... I kinda like it! And I use it on purpose because I like the UI and the features! So you asked a question that was extremely pertinent to me. You don't have to agree, I'm just completely uninterested in arguing about it. :)

I also have an iPhone client that I use on the run (Fuze). I don't love it (specifically, the room support is horrible and strange), but I do use it when I'm on the run and/or on my Linux box at home. I haven't tried SIPE but I keep meaning too.

[buddhagrrl.livejournal.com]

We're using communicator very effectively here. It's great, since we all got it pushed by IT, so for most people there was no need to go install it separately (though I did on my dev machine), Outlook integration is great, status is great, and screensharing (and control sharing) is fast and easy compared to every other option I've had to use, which is key for us since we have so many geographically diverse teams.

For personal use though I'm a big fan of gchat and gtalk.

[soong.livejournal.com]

I use IRC at work all the time for group chatdespite the obvious prevalence of gtalk.

[ckd]

An internal IRC setup seems like a useful solution. You could even have bots that do things like give info about ticket, bug, or revision numbers.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Integration of IRC support into Pidgin and Trillian has helped this as a potential solution... it just seems like falling back on "WHAT I'M COMFORTABLE WITH" :)

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

We use IRC here; we Linux folks use Pidgin, the management types use whatever Microsoft thing works. And it emulates the roomful of chatter (that prompts solutions popping up) quite well.