I’ve been looking for a decent chat server to set up at work, as we have a problem I suspect isn’t unfamiliar to many people – our staff use a variety of different chat providers (MSN, Google Talk etc.) and it just doesn’t work very well. When you want to talk to someone, you need to get their address. You’ll also need an account with them on the same provider.
An internal chat server then, gives quite a few benefits. You can use your existing internal account system (Active Directory/LDAP), you use one protocol, you can have chat rooms for each business unit/team, and if you set up a universal contact list, there is no need for users to add anyone to their own contact list. When a new employee joins the company, add them to the relevant AD/LDAP group and they are automatically added to everyone’s contact list.
I was tempted by IRC at first, but while there are some resources/addons to get LDAP authentication working, it puts off a lot of people (it’s old, and its not flashy. Not great reasons, but I don’t really want to have to convince people to use it).
Then I found Openfire, which fit every requirement I had nicely. In 30 minutes I had a working Jabber chat server integrated with Active Directory, and in another 20 I had it working perfectly with the relevant groups on the Active Directory server. Jabber is supported by numerous client programs on most platforms as well. I’m very impressed by it, and highly recommend you take a look at it if you are looking for something similar.
It even has a few plugins which look like they could be used for some sort of support chat setup – check out the Fastpath plugins on the Plugins page.