Skype is fine, but because of its closed nature, it cannot be used in projects with a more strict security policy – something is transferred over public Internet, but we cannot know what.
Our need is somewhat simple: we have several people at the office in Helsinki, and a couple of guys remotely at Espoo or Tampere. We’d like to have a very simple group chat with only the minimum features: chat history and a bell indicating that someone has said something.
Jabber is a nice protocol, but its implementation mostly sucks. We tried Psi because it had received lots of great reviews, but it wasn’t quite what we expected: the user interface looked like my first Java AWT hack and it didn’t even have a way to notify that you’ve received a new message (you know those blinking lights in the taskbar). We also tried some others, but they weren’t any better. Some had nice emoticon sets, though.
Finally we found Spark. It
- has a simple and clean UI
- is written in Java(!)
- supports emoticons(!)
- has incoming message notifications
- shows chat history
- uses a SSL secured connection out-of-the-box
- doesn’t require too much configuration
Basically all we need! Not to mention that the server-side counterpart (Openfire) was really easy to install. Not as good as Skype, but almost there.
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- Contacts in Spark
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- Group chat with Spark