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

[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?