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mactus

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Private Instant Messenging System for company use.

We would like to use Instant Messenging for text chat, webcam video conferencing and VoIP with staff in other offices. We have branch offices in other countries and all offices are connected via broadband. The total employee size is about 100. What product or solutions are there in the market that we can purchase and use? This has to be a private IM system (not public MSN or Yahoo messenger) where we can invite external suppliers or customers to join in.

The required features are:
1. Instant messenging - online/offline status
2. Text chat
3. Voice chat
4. Webcam
5. File sharing

Thanks

Regards
Joo

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I am not a fan of skype as it does have some major issues:-

1) It uses a non standard protocol. If you therefore want to link your system to someone elses phone system you are stuck.

2) It is an externally hosted system. If you make calls between phones within a location you are still using internet bandwidth.

3) It uses peer to peer technology and tries to get through firewalls. Because of this is does tend to work at locations where others dont however this means it is impossibly to categorise the packets and apply quality of service to them. On a busy internet connection you may therefore get interrupted speech and be unable to solve it.

If you are a traveling user then yes Skype is ideal but if you want a fixed system for communicating between specific locations then there are better solutions available.
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alexsim2004

Not sure about this but would NetMeeting do the job?
NetMeeting is in the middle of being pushed out by Microsoft.  You can still open it in XP, but you will get no support from Microsoft.
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Merete
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