Recommend a office lan messenger?

A

armitage

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Hey there.
A new girl started today at our office. Now the problem is she's deaf so as a easier than email way of communicating with her I thought bout hooking us all up in the office with a messenger program for when were not standing by her to lip read or pathetically try to sign.
At the moment the best we can do is use email to contact her which.....if you can imagine can get quite confusing trying to hold a conversation.

Unfortunately our Head Office IT guys have blocked all the usual suspects(Gtalk, msn, skype etc.) so that leaves us having to use an internal lan only messenger program.

Does anybody else here use an internal IM?
If so can you maybe give a review and maybe indicate if its free or not(were poor).

Thanks in advance.

We just need something that works over normal tcp/ip and no huge installations.
 
Explain things to the head office IT guys and say "discrimination lawsuit" when they moan. :)
 
w1z4rd said:
winpopup? I think it comes default with Windows.
Click to expand...

I stand to be corrected, but I believe that the messenger service (which allows Winpopup / Winchat to work) is disabled by default by Windows XP Service Pack 2

So all the pc's in the office would need to have that specific service enabled, and set to auto-start as well.

Perhaps someone can confirm?
 
Ryder_JHB said:
I stand to be corrected, but I believe that the messenger service (which allows Winpopup / Winchat to work) is disabled by default by Windows XP Service Pack 2

So all the pc's in the office would need to have that specific service enabled, and set to auto-start as well.

Perhaps someone can confirm?
Click to expand...

Yeah, appears you are right about sp2 disabling it, but :

Alerter" and "Messenger Services" Disabled
These are part of the WinPopup system, and it's the mechanism that "Messenger Spam" uses. They can be easily enabled in the "Services" control-panel applet.
Click to expand...

1. To find your service listing, click Start / Run, type "compmgmt.msc" and click OK.
2. Click the "+" next to "Services and Applications" and click "Services."
3. In the right pane of the window, scroll down and right-click "Messenger."
4. In the popup menu, select "Properties" and under "Startup Type" select "Automatic" or "Manual". Click OK.
5. Now click "Start the Service" to the left of the service listing. WinPopup messages should now work.
Click to expand...

Regarding the startup script... perhaps a shortcut on the desktop for those who want to communicate with the deaf girl.
 
Last edited:
Im currently getting past the blockage of IM's by using a firefox extention that connects me to gtalk. Unfortunately I haven't found a different way for the others.

Plus asking a normal non techie person to use the ways that I do to get my im's running is asking a bit much.
I would ideally like to get a standalone program and not a web based one for ease of use for the normal user.
 
Perhaps an internal only IRC server would be an idea too... But only for work purposes! ;) Not to talk k@k all day long!
 
I would love to use bwana's suggestion.
2 problems
1: our IT is insanely slow. Even if i explained to them step by step what to do to fix it....they still would only get around to doing it in about a years time.
2: I don't think they have the mental capacity to enable just a select range of users to use IM's.

The reason i'm looking for a fully fledged messenger prog is so that the user can hold a full fledged decent conversation with each other rather than relying on email/netsend messages.
 
w1z4rd said:
gtalk uses jabber, and it would also required the installation of a jabber service on the LAN.
Click to expand...

Another option would be to use a jabber client and connect to a jabber server that allows connections on non-blocked ports (https) over ssl.
 
Surprised to see all these posts and not one mention of BORGChat...
 
Yea I like the IRC option, not that hard to setup a simple one, and there are loads of options that are just click and chat type things
 
icyrus said:
Another option would be to use a jabber client and connect to a jabber server that allows connections on non-blocked ports (https) over ssl.
Click to expand...

Would you be able to set this up without using a dedicated pc for it?

As mentioned were kinda badly funded so dedicating a pc to running a IM service..kinda wont stick well.
 
armitage said:
Would you be able to set this up without using a dedicated pc for it?

As mentioned were kinda badly funded so dedicating a pc to running a IM service..kinda wont stick well.
Click to expand...

If you don't want to run your own server there are local alternatives for instance jabber.obsidian.co.za

Download one of the jabber clients: Psi is nice and basic to start with.

Register a new account, but for make sure to manually specify the server host and port and also make sure to check the box to use SSL.

For server use jabber.obsidian.co.za and for port use 443
 
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