Instant Messenger for use in the office

Water Cooler
#1

Can anyone recommend a good instant messanging service to use in the office.

At my last place we used MS Office Communicator. I’m looking for something free that won’t require us to purchase a licence (at least until there is traction gained for people to use this form of communication).

The main features I’d like are the following:

a. ability to have multiple seperate chats going on at once

b. ability to see if a person is at their desk and available (so you can avoid walking over to their desk only to see that they’re not there).

c. is reasonably professional in look and feel and doesn’t require people getting a Yahoo account or something that means it’s never going to take off.

#2

AIM

#3

Gchat?

#4

Office Communicator is really your best bet if your shop uses Outlook.

#5

bloomberg IB

#6

Everyone but our Control group and IT have Bloomberg. In the instances we need to chat with IT or Control we use AIM. AIM is compatible with capturing services for compliance issues.

#7

We use AIM or Bloomberg chat here. However, I pretty no chat programs at all. May not be that efficient but e-mail tends to be a better way to document things, so that’s the route I go.

#8

gtalk?

#9

My company uses Spark, but I can’t speak to how good it is or how much it costs.

#10

We use Microsoft Lync…don’t know if that requires purchasing anything additional to the MSFT package your office already has.

#11

I only use Communicator when I ask the cute girl in the other department if she wants to take a coffee break. Besides that, it’s email for me.