Network I.M

Danny_1983

First off....hello to everyone, i have just signed up, forum looks very helpful indeed.

So, my first of probably many, questions...

I am looking into implementing some kind of instant messaging solution onto our LAN. At the moment this will only be used by the various IT Staff who are based across multiple sites. The criteria is..

Must be able to log all conversations
Setup possible block and allow groups for certain users depending on their level
All of the usual logging of conversations 'gumpf'
One thing i would like to try to acheive...once all of the users have been added to your contact list the ability to then view what projects these users are currently working on. I'm not sure if this is possible, but i think it would be handy and then people can share information between each other. We do currently have a intranet which runs from a sharepoint server (the free part of sharepoint downloadable from Microsoft)

I have had a quick look at the MS Office Communication Server (i think thats its name) but i dont think that is really going to do what we need.

So, any suggestions or ideas are welcome!

Many Thanks

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Comments

royal

Hi, welcome to the forums. And btw, there's an OCS forum.

You can do Instant Messaging with Office communications Server. You can either do a Standard Server which will install Enterprise Edition which will allow you to load balance behind a Hardware Load Balancer (NLB not supported) or a Standard Edition which will use SQL Express.

If you want to archive messages, you can use the Archiving Server Role.

Communicator 2007 integrates with Outlook. All users that are added to a contact list have Company privileges. Access Levels are Public, Company, Team, Personal, Blocked. The more access you give them, the more information you can see about that user which includes Free/Busy information. So as long as you the person keeps their free/busy up to date, you can see this.

Also, there's status levels. Online, Busy, In a call, etc... There's a custom XML file that you can point a specific registry path to the file. Of course this can be done through a logon script so you can give users custom presence levels. Not sure if this is what you'd want to view what projects ppl are working on. There is a utility out there that users can download to create their own custom presence levels. Users can use this to modify their presence to display the project they're working on.

nicklauscombs

we use a program called softros messenger

IT_Admin

We use program called Spark

blargoe

OCS is great on everything you're looking for except reporting on what is archived. Fortunately, there are third party apps that can interface with OCS that do a pretty good job from what I have come to understand. If you're on an exchange/sharepoint environment, OCS is where you need to go.

royal

There is a resource kit tool that'll do the querying in the SQL database for you. Blargoe, I haven't done a whole lot with archiving yet with OCS. What tools integrate with OCS to automate your reporting for the Archiving Server?

HeroPsycho

blargoe wrote:

OCS is great on everything you're looking for except reporting on what is archived. Fortunately, there are third party apps that can interface with OCS that do a pretty good job from what I have come to understand. If you're on an exchange/sharepoint environment, OCS is where you need to go.

+1 for Enterprise Vault.

http://www.symantec.com/business/products/newfeatures.jsp?pcid=2244&pvid=322_1

royal

royal wrote:

There is a resource kit tool that'll do the querying in the SQL database for you. Blargoe, I haven't done a whole lot with archiving yet with OCS. What tools integrate with OCS to automate your reporting for the Archiving Server?

Just found this tool:
http://www.instant-tech.com/

Wonder what others there are.

tiersten

You can use of the many Jabber clients and servers out there to do what you want. If you've got Outlook already however then use OCS as others have suggested.

blargoe

I've found that the built-in archving + resource kit tools give you little more than really crude "call log" records that give such high level info that it's useless, and you're left with coding your own reports, if you have the time and in house knowledge of SQL reporting services and the OCS API's.

Since we're also using Symantec Enterprise Vault for email archiving, we purchased a SKU for IM archiving. This turned out to be a separate product from EV called IM Manager that you can configure to store the IM archives in an EV archive. I haven't been able to work with it too much because our Windows servers are 64 bit and the IM Manager only works on 32 bit servers... but the software has a lot of functionality. You can configure it to also capture any MSN/Yahoo/AIM/Google/ICQ conversations too and you can do more granular allow/deny operations than you can out of the box with OCS.

I've heard a couple mentions about Quest's archiving product as well, I haven't had the chance to demo it yet. I probably won't since we already bought the IM Manager, I just have to find the time to swing my stuff over to 32 bit servers.