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In our company (web company, 35 people, engineering and business, OS X clients, linux servers), we're evaluating alternatives to Skype which we use mostly for group and user-to-user chat.

I've looked into IRC but saw two problems:

  1. when my IRC client is not connected to the server I miss the messages. That'd be a "no go". AFAIK there are "IRC bouncers" - but I'd like this to have this for all users per default, is there a IRC daemon which has this included?
  2. I'm wondering if business people would feel comfortable with IRC as it seems more like a "hacker tool" - any experience on this?

P.S. We've also looked into Jabber but IMO the clients on OS X are way behind clients like Colloquy or Linkinus

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We're using Openfire+Spark on both Windows and Mac OSX clients, working just great. Even file transfers and screenshots work flawlessly.

The only thing I miss is VoIP integration, but it's said to be possible via Red5 server.

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openfire supports offline messages. i would rather stick with jabber than trying to enforce everything over irc. – akira Jul 7 '10 at 10:07
thanks for the hint with Spark - although the client is from 2007 it looks like "reduced to the max" – Philipp Keller Jul 7 '10 at 14:28
Just make sure you use the beta release for OS X clients (igniterealtime.org/downloads/beta.jsp), and the latest MSI for Windows Clients (igniterealtime.org/community/docs/DOC-1822) – pauska Jul 7 '10 at 14:31
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up vote 2 down vote

when my IRC client is not connected to the server I miss the messages. That'd be a "no go". AFAIK there are "IRC bouncers" - but I'd like this to have this for all users per default, is there a IRC daemon which has this included?

Maybe you want to take a look at Quassel IRC which is a kind of IRC bouncer with its own client. Quassel runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X (and basically any OS which is supported by Qt).

It supports disconnected operations which means that a client, which connects to a Quassel core will receive the backlog of the IRC channels which the Quassel core is connected to.

I personally would see XMPP/Jabber as the most appropriate solution for your problem and you should invest at least some time trying to solve the problems you've run into. Maybe try another XMPP server.

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thanks for the hint, gives me confidence to go more into the Jabber direction – Philipp Keller Jul 7 '10 at 14:28
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up vote 1 down vote

how about jabber?

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we've looked into Jabber (Adium as client, openfire as server), but we run into so many problems: 1. we didn't see if the other client was online 2. joining channels on Adium often just does nothing - no error, etc. Jabber felt so much behind IRC - especially the clients. – Philipp Keller Jul 7 '10 at 6:48
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up vote 1 down vote

My own solution to missing stuff on IRC is to run the client on a server... The likes of GNU Screen or tmux allow you to leave console based applications running in the background while you are logged off - the client I use is irssi.

As for your second question, you could point out the thousands of open source projects co-ordinated and developed over IRC. Point to freenode and OFTC as examples rather than efnet ;)

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I'm afraid screen and irssi or any other text-based IRC client is not quite compatible with the intended target audience. – joschi Jul 7 '10 at 10:42
indeed, console is not a fit for our business people :-) For me personally it is - I'm a screen fan – Philipp Keller Jul 7 '10 at 14:29
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up vote 0 down vote

i would prefer jabber, especially the openfire server. if you dislike the jabber clients: try bitlbee as a "pseudo" irc-server you can connect to with your favorite irc-clients.

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