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Basic Internal Instant Messaging Solution?
sk8dork asks: "I am pretty much _the_ internal IT person at the company I work for and I am recognizing the need for internal Instant Messaging more and more each day. While email is quick and easy to send, it's not always the quickest way to get your message to someone when they're not monitoring their inbox every second of the day. Having come from a position in Dell tech support I've experienced the MS communications solution but was put off by the instability of it and, now that I've looked into purchasing it, the steep price as well. For more stability we often used an internal IRC channel, but most people would either not login or they'd just be put off by its complexity. In this new company, where close to no one is 'computer savvy', I am in need of an Instant Messaging solution that is easy to use, secure, limited to our network, and inexpensive. I'd like to stay away from the mainstream IM clients such as Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and others. We're running Windows Server 2003 for Small Business (sorry) and will be soon upgrading out of the SBE to regular Windows Server 2003. Any helpful information will be greatly appreciated."
Jabber along with Exodus works wonders. When I worked at a small/mid sized (200 employees) business I configured this across the board along via VPN. It was secure, fast, stable and as good as any IM client and server I've come across. I configure employees into groups in accordance with their office (e.g. NY, Miami, Mass, etc.). Workers were able to transfer files when necessary, vent gripes without worrying about snooping, etc.
Infiltrated dot Net
Net Send and find a gui?
Have you heard of DBabble?
We use JiveServer (Wildfire) and the associated spark client.
It uses the jabber protocol and as such, can be used with a variety of IM clients.
I mean, honestly.
http://www.jabber.org/software/servers.shtml
Yes, you can get a server for a Windows platform, yes you can pay for it too if it helps.
Deleted
I use this novel instant communication technique called talking.
See I get up, or just raise my voice (depending on the situation) and talk to the person I want to have an instant communication with. It is pretty easy to have one-to-many instant messages, too.
It is nice in that this instant messaging technique continues to work even if the server or network goes down.
One the down side, it only works for short distances, but you can get the phone plug-in for longer distances. But with the phone plug-in it is tough to see if the person you want to send an instant message to is "on-line".
The other downside is you can't change your avatar (aka buddy icon), and I don't like the way mine looks. Some people try to hack this sometimes (Halloween for example) but it rarely looks right. You can get your avatar professional altered but that cost a lot of money.
However you spell it, isn't Rendezvous basically what you're looking for? I mean, that's the simplest way to do messages and file-sharing over a LAN, right? I think it's called Bonjour on a Mac. I've only used it once or twice, but it seems pretty simple.
/slap boss
Infiltrated dot Net
Even if one assumes that "we have a windows server, so everything must be on Microsoft's platform no matter what", I'm pretty sure there are a few legally free servers available that run on windows, in addition to the reference implementation and a few others that could easily be run on a scavenged box running Linux.
XMPP is well documented, and it's easy to set up an "internal only" server for in-house use. You can also add more servers and link them together later if you end up needing to, for example, set up servers in widely separated offices.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
http://www.jivesoftware.org/wildfire/
The best jabber implementation that I have used is Wildfire by Jivesoftware. It was really really easy to install and setup (even with LDAP support), and our company has been using it for months and months. It's really great to have an internal IM server.
ICQ offers a groupware product, designed to be used on internal networks only. Best of all, its freeware. http://www.networkingfiles.com/Communications/Icqg roupware.htm
--BSOBN--
"I've experienced the MS communications solution but was put off by the instability of it..." [and] "... the steep price as well."
Sometimes it seems to me that Microsoft is more of an adversarial behavior company than a software company.
Today someone called from Microsoft, inviting people at my company to come to some kind of educational event. She had inaccurate information about my company, even though we have been selling Microsoft products for more than 20 years.
The previous caller from Microsoft thought we were in New York. I'm guessing Microsoft's customer relations management software is no better than the communications software.
--
Taxpayer Karma: If you contribute money to kill people, expect your own quality of life to diminish.
You can set up your own Jabber server behind the firewall. You can take your pick of the various IM clients to use -- most of them implement Jabber.
When I was interested in such things (2002), I bought and read O'Reilly's Programming Jabber. No doubt it's dated by now, but it's my recollection that it was thorough and helpful.
My father is a blogger.
I've used it and prefer it over Jabberd2 what I ended up using. :( My coworkers didn't understand that point and click web based administration (imagine that!). Jive definitely rocks. If the person asking this wants even more security along with VPN's (if he has them) he could set up proxies, etc.. Come to think of it, if he doesn't have VPN security, he may just want to use SASL or TLS. I know I wouldn't want to be sending propietary messages over the net without encryption.
Infiltrated dot Net
Troll?!? seems a bit unfair to me! Makes a valid point.
Wildfire and Psi.
We used to use an app called LanChat at a previous office. Dead simple, does what the name says.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I've got your MS solution right here: Using Windows Chat in Windows XP. May work for Win2k3, YMMV.
You're welcome.
Despite the trollish tone of the parent, the point is valid.
Possibilities, off the top of my head...
1) Different channels for different departments
2) An "all" channel where you can broadcast messages to everyone
3) Short, simple, impromptu meetings that can easily be logged
4) A variety of clients with varying degrees of friendliness, from mIRC to GAIM; or develop your own to fit the needs of your company
:(){
Waste may be an option: http://waste.sourceforge.net/ I haven't implamented it, but a while back I was looking at it to use for my dev team. It's opensource and I believe it was created by the NullSoft (Winamp) guys. I haven't looked at it in a while, so I don't know how stable it is but you could give it a try.
I'm frightened to live in a world where IRC is considered complex.
Have you tried Tonic?
We use it at work for instant messenging. It has a number of features similar to MSN/ICQ, etc but its LAN only and best of all its free!
We have about 60 users online and the performance is very good.
Their latest beta builds are improving nicely with features such as multichat so hopefully a new version will be released soon.
You've almost certainly got an instant messaging solution installed and fully functional on every one of your desktops right now. It uses less screen space than almost any 3rd party app and it supports single sign-on without configuration effort. Here's how to send someone a message using it:
[windows+r] net send {username} {message text} [enter]
P.S. The UNIX guys have a similar utility called "write" that's been on every UNIX-ish system I've ever used.
I have to say that Campfire is really cool. Although it is hosted, and not exactly IM, it's easier to set up and more productive than Jabber or IRC.
We use it where I work. Dead simple to use. Works a treat over the entire country. I wish I had more to offer as a rewiew but I am a mere fork-and-spoon operator in sector 7-G.
More info at http://www.wiredred.com/secure-messaging/
-- maskwa
I recently set up ejabberd and JWChat (AJAX-based web client) at my office. ejabberd authenticates against our Windows domain using LDAP, and using JWChat means there's no client to install. I tried a couple of other jabber servers, but ejabberd was the easiest to integrate with JWChat.
I haven't had much buy-in yet, but that's another story.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
I set up jabberd in an afternoon. Adding the jabberd 1.4 chatroom server module to jabberd 2 was a little annoying, but now it's up and hasn't given any trouble. It even comes with a decent example /etc/init.d/ style script which works with fedora core and probably other systems with little modification.
Start Running Better Polls
and suggest a (gasp!) commercial solution. Not free, but supported: Sametime. Commercially supported by IBM/Lotus, fully secure, with a built-in web conferencing system, and works on your Windows 2003 server. Can be completely stand-alone, or you can have it authenticate to your company's LDAP directory. The nice thing is you buy only the number of clients you need, with no need to purchase server software. Clients are $47.59/user, and allows you to use the stand-alone Sametime Connect client (Windows, Mac or a Trillian Pro plugin), the browser-based chat client, or connect via your Blackberry if you're already using their Enterprise server 4.1 or later.
I know you commented about the instability and cost of the "MS Communications solution"--by which I assume you mean the Communicator/Live Communications Server combo--but you may wish to look at it again. LCS 2005 is actually quite stable for an MS app.
Where I work, I recently switched from a Unix group to a Windows one--trying new things, learn new tricks, blah blah blah--and was given a project to establish federation using LCS. In researching LCS, I was actually pleasantly surprised at the SIP RFC compliance (Ok, there are some MS extensions, but at least they echo the SIMPLE working group), as well as the general functionality and stability of the application. If you're working in an MS shop, the presence capabilities of Communicator/LCS blend nicely with other MS apps, and if you're planning on passing support off to another organization, the management of LCS--whether doing federation, PIC, or remote access--*is* simple enough to do.
I agree the license cost is steep, but you may be able to get the accountants to buy off on LCS/Communicator for the security (TLS end-to-end) and the SOX compliance (logging, etc.) features alone.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Jabber or IRC would both work. I would reccommend against AIM, MSN, & Yahoo simply for the fact of viruses. I'm knowledgeable enough to pick up those spoof IMs that contain links to viruses, but those less computer inclined may not realize that their buddy is really not sending them that IM. On a business network with nearly everyone using AIM, the virus could prove dangerous. Learning from experience, educating the users on this matter may prove useless. (At my job, we constantly tell people to make sure they leave their computer logged off and turned on when they leave so we can push out patches, updates, etc. You'd be suprised how few actually listen) So beating their brains with "be careful with IMs may not be successful either. Just a thought.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
actual conversations aren't logged and easily searchable. Also, you can't simply paste a chunk of code into an actual conversation, or transfer long URLs.
= Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=15 529472 and you'll find what you need. See ya tomorrow. Yeah, 188393. Right. commentsort equals zero, you got it. Later."
"hey bob, what's up? Oh, right, yeah, just go to http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188393&op
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
We disable the message service (because of broadcast messages), and we consider it extremely bad behavior in our shop to send people these sorts of messages. If you need to chat with someone, email them, use IM (if available), or just walk down the hall...
In short, "net send" is off limits in our office.
We use e/pop http://www.wiredred.com/ at the law firm where I work (I'm not in IT, my only exposure is to the client). It's about as basic as you can get, and even senior partners can operate it (we have a few that weren't even on email until 2-3 years ago). No other connection with the software, just use it and know that it's 'good enough' for us.
geek. lawyer.
Just chiming in to say, Jabber. I work at a large financial institution and that's what we use. It works great. I use Pandion for my client.
An SSL connection to your jabber server is enough. No need for end-to-end encryption. If you don't trust your own internal server, what DO you trust?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Pretty rudimentary but it comes with windows....
But before that, we used a Jabber-based system that included one server inside the firewall and one server outside the firewall (probably in a DMZ), which meant that I could use the corporate IM system from work and also from home, on or off a VPN connection, which was amazingly convenient. It also meant that I could start up the IM client when I booted my laptop, and if I was at home, that meant that it could log in without waiting for me to start my VPN client. And it had all the Jabbery goodness I'd expect, though I didn't try using a bunch of different clients just for fun.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are really two IM standards that matter - the better developed one is Jabber, and the emerging one is the SIP standard used for VOIP, which is a proxyable presence server that can support various media including text, VOIP, and video. Other than that, most of the choices tend to be proprietary, so you use clients like GAIM that tap into them. A number of the bigger IM services are moving from proprietary-only protocols to one of those two standards, and if you're doing VOIP anyway, it may make sense to have your VOIP presence server / directory system also support IM.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Oh, the havoc we used to wreak with CTCP SMSG...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We use SILC for communication.
That would be WinPop.
What should one watch out for in IM clients like MSN? My daughter started using that, but I never have.
I warned her about fake links in emails and fake email senders, and showed her how easy it is to send a mail
From: Saddam Hussein <president@whitehouse.gov>
(After which we played a while sending fake emails to her friends, seeming to come from other friends, teachers, etc. so for email, I think she and her friends got the message... Next exercise will be to spoof the school web site)
But having no experience with IM, I don't know against what to warn her, much less how to demonstrate it.
File transfers are a bit slow though. Also, outsiders tend to get confused when I stand up and say: "Hey Mike, here's that file you wanted. 10101011101011010100010101010011010101010110101010 01010010101010101010101010010101110101010101101010 10101100101101010100101101011101010101101101001010 10101010010001010100101001010010100101011010101010 10100101111101010101110101010010101000001010101000 00101010010101000101010000000000000001101111111111 11010101010000000110010101010100101010010101001010 10010101010010101010010101010010101011010101010101 010010101".
*slight crashing sound*
And how exactly are you going to use that in a business environment where the users are MBAs lesser business types?
"You need IM? Oh sir just open a command line and..." *plonk* fired.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Warn me next time, I can't see sick shit like that while at work! >: (
1010101110101101010001010101001101010101011010101and let's not forget that it has support for asterisk. The list of contacts gets updated with who's on the phone, etc. and there's a pop-up with the caller ID on your screen (bottom right corner).
100% agree that SIP is the best way to go forwards, as it means you've then got a user authentication database to hang a VOIP telephony system off when you want to go that way.
also, whilst the other players might not like to inter-work too much with instant messaging, there's a slightly bigger chance of them doing SIP gateways for their voice chat.
My advice to you is keep it simple and more secure by not implement IM at all. Tell you user base to let their fingers and/feet do the walking. The exercise is good for people sitting for most of the day anyway.
That's very short-sighted of you.
IM works well for cutting down on the number of internal calls, which is very good when you have remote workers. Most people find it to be less intrusive then a telephone call (I can do multiple things while monitoring a chat conversation). It works well for those quick questions or for communicating information which is tricky to read over the phone.
That doesn't mean that it supplants / replaces telephone calls. My co-worker and I (who are a few hours apart) regularly flip between using e/pop and a telephone call depending on what needs to be discussed. Often, we'll be on the phone talking to each other and pop up an e/pop chat window to exchange URLs or technical details. Which means neither of us have to spend 3 minutes trying to read out a URL.
Or if one of us is on the phone, we can e/pop another person to find out their input on something. Or get a question answered without leaving a voice message and playing phone tag.
Getting effective use out of an IM solution is an education issue. Just like e-mail, you need to train your users when and why to use IM instead of phone instead of e-mail. Telephones excel for in-depth conversations because of the verbal cues (face-to-face is still better, but not always possible) but IM excels for detail conversations (where you need to exchange part #s, URLs, or other text information). E-Mail is a time-shifted medium. All of them are "tools" for communication and each is useful in different situations.
One example of a training issue with IM: A polite IM conversation begins with "hello" and ends when *both* parties say "goodbye". A few of our users were very "abrupt" when using IM. They'd leave the chat room as soon as they thought their question was answered, which is a bit like slamming down the telephone receiver in real life. We've had to train them to wait for a "goodbye" signal from the other side so that they don't appear so rude.
Also, we found that without an IM solution in-house, our users were attempting to use e-mail as a instant message system. They would complain about not getting e-mail back from someone within 5 minutes. The IM solution defuses that situation by giving them a more instant-feedback communication avenue. (And I can go back to telling users not to check e-mail more often then twice an hour.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
A collegue once got so fed up with his boss so he put a batch file together and stuck it in his boss's start up. The batch file contained one line: net send * CUNT!
He got found out as he was crying with laughter when two guys started a shouting match almost escalating to violence with his boss.
The other flaw is that nearby users are able to recieve traffic that's not intended for them. This can be mitigated by whispering, but this tends to result in increased data corruption and the need for retransmissions.
What a great 1927 film. I loved "dial 8 for information". I can't get that to work.
- Tabbed Chat - have a tab for each of your peers
- Encryption
- Tells you when the user is typing a message - their name goes bold
- Tells you when the user's box is locked - their name goes italics
- Saves peer and tab configuration
Go here: http://hms.dyndns.org/t++Hey,
Here at Pythian Remote DBA we've had a client these past two years called Omnipod. They run a good shop and the tech guys there are absolute tops.
Their software is a turnkey hosted secure instant messaging platform. It integrates with the big three networks just fine. It has amazing archiving and audit abilities, thus its popularity in the financial sector (those dudes have to keep all written communication for a few years or they're not allowed to use it at all).
Furthermore, it has an extremely cool feature that's not in any of Y! AIM or MSN: You can create Venn-diagram like overlap groups so that line workers can't just IM the CEO, and so that you can control the communication of presence information inside and outside the group.
It's all very cool and I can recommend it without hesitating. Although it's not FOS, the fact that you don't have to administer it and that you can be up and running tomorrow totally kicks ass.
HTH
Paul
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
Runs on Windows, comes with an Instant Messaging component, and to appease your management that might be worried about IM traffic carrying company secrets out to your competitors, it doesn't hook up to YIM, AIM, or MSN. However, the GAIM client does talk to both Jabber and GWIM.
Best, is that should you later want to move to Linux, your GroupWise system will move seamlessly.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
You said when you had an internal IRC channel set up, your users would avoid logging into it and were turned off by its complexity.
Regardless of what Instant Messaging solution you eventually decide on, will the situation be any different? If your users don't see the value of IM, it will be hard to convince them to make use of it, no matter how secure, convenient, or simple it is.
- 1 400MHz Celeron-based computer running SUSE Linux 9 (most recent version available at the time)
- jabberd2 for the Jabber server, with a MySQL backend
- Psi client for all the Windows users.
- A PHP script to automatically add everyone to everyone else's contact list (yeah, I'm the guy who posted that).
Psi was great because it was easy to configure so that their application profile was stored on a network drive, so that no matter what computer you logged in to, you had your contact list immediately available. As well, it was really easy to install remotely (just copy the app directory and some shortcuts to the right places on the remote computer). The end result was a computer was saved from the dumpster and put to good use, and everyone got to chat without everyone asking everyone else "whats your jabber address".You said when you had an internal IRC channel set up, your users would avoid logging into it and were turned off by its complexity. Regardless of what Instant Messaging solution you eventually decide on, will the situation be any different?
For many users, yes. A lot of casual computer users know and use AIM, or MSN. They have friends online and want to be able to chat with them during the day. They don't know how to do voice chats or group chats and don't want to. If you IM them a file, they ask for help. The learning curve is zero to just send them messages. Now look at IRC. It has channels, and broadcasts by default. Most of the messages on a channel will not be for them and are just noise. The only people on it sending them messages are work people.
They want to be on IM. They don't like being in an IRC room. The answer, provide both. Then, those that don't want to listen in a chat room and deal with the distraction can just use IM and are only bothered when it directly concerns them. Those that want to be "in the loop" for general conversations on a topic or group or for the whole company can do that too. I've introduced a number of remedial users to IM and only one of them (without an always on internet connection) has ever not taken the initiative to log in and use it from then on. At the same time, many don't make use of IRC even when it is available via the same client and they have been trained in how to use it.
My sysas a really really really loud voice. Works wonders
Cool, now we can save huge amounts of time, and maybe use a few letters for redundancy! Now I just need to update Mike, otherwise he might crash the next time I send him files. Poor bastard, I once mistakenly said 2 instead of a 1 and he just froze until the boss came and booted him.
I've used a freeware program called Dema LAN Chat. It looks like IRC, no setup required. It does not seem to be available on the creator's website anymore. If you are interested, I have a copy: Download from me
I also am the sole IT guy working for a small company (25 heads). I set up Jabber on a linux server several years ago, along with Just Another Jabber Client on the Windows PCs. It has works great and is used daily by everyone within our office. The real value came when I added some PHP scripts using class.jabber.php. Using this class I have written scripts to quickly add/delete users. More important to our company, I have integrated scripts with some of our business processes so that the users get automated messages when certain events happen (invoices and purchase orders created, faxes sent or failed to send, etc.) Once you learn how to write one script, it's easy to create new ones.
The only thing I haven't been able to do is enable easy logging. I even went so far as to use tcpdump to grab messages. We a couple of guys that were caught sending suggestive messages to a girl and needed to make sure they had cleaned up their act. Other than that, Jabber rocks.
Get a copy of VMware Player (it's free at http://www.vmware.com/download/player/) and load any of several Jabber virtual appliances. (You may have to change the virtual ethernet adaptor to use the bridged network.) Here's one applicance that looks like a close fit: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/24 8
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I've done some basic tinkering with Akeni LAN Messenger and I think it fits your needs pretty well. It operates on the local segment only, not across the internet, and provides basic messaging / file transfer functionality. There's a linux version too.
"Encription" as you so eloquently put it, is not the only factor. I know you're a fanboy, but try to reason why PSI is BETTER than GAIM.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Simple. PSI (unlike gaim) supports protocol transports.
You can sign into your AOL, Yahoo, etc accounts through your jabber server.
This allows you to firewall off all the major chat services from their native clients and still allow your employees to talk on their personal IM accounts to the outside world while logging all the conversations.
PSI is both difficult to setup and use; as far as IMs go. The immaturity of the client (PSI) is quite evident from the complex and unforgiving error messages like "Reason:". Jabber messages to particular services can be (permanently?) blocked via certain gateway servers being arbitrarily blocked, for various reasons at random intervals! Technically superior yes. Practically more useful, no. When a client cant reach your universal messenger when you're online, you'd have to go back and install another client? That defeats the purpose.
I do not agree that PSI is a better choice. I can't professionally recommend a program that is not the best for a client TODAY, I wouldn't recommend it for the random passer-by until it was honestly the best solution.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
and IM work well for those of us that are either hard of hearing or completely deaf.
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
To be honest some people might not be keen on this idea, but hey it can be a solution to time delays. Some people think their cell phone is part of their personal lives, well isn't your job more important then your cell phone? Simply organize a meeting to establish who has cell phones, depending on the type of company and employees, then from there, have everyone exchange the appropriate numbers or e-mail address's. Some boss's may like to see the initiative taken to get the office on a faster, more reliable office setup.
Hey it worked for me in an old job where they say nay bob to the Inter-Office Im'ing. Probably didn't help, but sometimes its best to look outside the problem for short term or final solutions.
Cheers
Ryan
www.lifeofryan.ca My reality is another's neverending endeavor.
talking is great except for when reccomending web sies i remember... *phone rings* me; hello? friend mike; whats the site for that article about data storage you told me about? me; go to slashdot.org to get the story at the first link. mike; huh? /..org?
me;spell slash and dot then type regular . org.got it?
mike;i tink so. nope it wont work.
me;forget it ill email you the link.
after that i laghed hysterically for 2 minutes.